A lifetime ago, I joined a couple of high school friends in an unprecedented three-way lie to our parents.

We told them we were sleeping over at each other’s homes that summer night, but far from it. We three Boston-area hooligans were up all night in Harvard Square, Cambridge, chatting with the buskers as they played their music for pennies, philosophizing on stools outside Au Bon Pain, propping our eyelids open with toothpicks under the streetlights, rebels without a pillowcase.

The next morning, with a taste like fermented radishes haunting our pasty mouths, we crossed the river, washed up in a Faneuil Hall bathroom and caught Dinosaur Jr. giving a free concert near Boston Common.

All I remember is lying on the grass, an exhausted curfew-breaker. But I don’t regret my night of illegal loitering. It beat the heck out of staring at our bedroom walls. In cities with buzz, we felt alive.

Speaking of life, it’s probably time to can the old sayings about how Minnesotans go to Minneapolis to sin and St. Paul to pray.

Or the one about how you could roll a bowling ball through downtown St. Paul after 5 p.m. and not hit anyone. Against criticism about price tags, the city and its partners have invested heavily in the Xcel Energy Center, CHS Field, the Palace Theatre, the new Major League Soccer stadium under construction in the the Midway and outdoor events like the Twin Cities Jazz Festival. Related Articles Noah Feldman: Sedition laws are the last resort of weak governments

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A lot of public money has gone to draw big, organized events. On top of that, new restaurants and residential conversions have brought new life downtown, even when there isn’t a game on.

From a recreational perspective, this isn’t the ho-hum city I discovered when I took this job 13 years ago. But it still isn’t the kind of place where three brainy high school curfew-breakers might enjoy camping out overnight for busking, free outdoor concerts or philosophizing on the cheap.

From Harriet Island Regional Park to the Creative Enterprise Zone by Raymond Avenue, there’s still a certain “almost, but not quite there” quality to the culture of St. Paul’s recreational scene, like a missing bench or shade tree where you should be able to sit for a spell and enjoy the view. We need a little push in this town to bring its arts and music and food and vibrancy onto the sidewalks and into the spotlight on a regular basis, instead of segregating our best offerings to select corners and occasions for those in the know.

But hey, many are trying.

We’ve got the McNally Smith College of Music, but there’s no celebrated tradition here of having students put out a hat and do some sidewalk busking, which is when you know your city has really hit big time. You can’t avoid buskers bringing out the local flavor in New Orleans, or Boston’s underground subway stations, or even inside the trains in New York City.

A pop-up concert and outdoor seating area by a downtown St. Paul bus stop this summer had local musicians entertaining travelers. There was music. There were tables and chairs. There was bean-bag toss. Sometimes, it’s that simple.

I got a gander of St. Paul’s best offerings and worst habits Saturday during the Grand Avenue Business Association’s Grand Meander, an annual holiday stroll through the business district. Somehow, the GABA folks asked me — a hopeless toast burner — to be a fill-in judge for a soup contest, which is like dropping a fat mouse in a vat of cheese. Grand Avenue has some excellent soups, and after 3.5 hours of sampling a dozen contenders, we tipped our collective hats to the French Meadow Bakery and Cafe’s curried cauliflower soup with ginger oil and smoked pumpkin seed panache. They even got a plaque.

The low point came when we found multiple cars parked six feet apart, hogging the equivalent of a stall and a half apiece. If Grand Avenue doesn’t want to help fund city coffers by using parking meters to regulate the stand-offish lunacy of suburban-style parking in a crowded urban business district, then business owners should fund an alternative. Hire a respected but unemployed senior gent, someone the ilk of Garrison Keillor, to run up and down the street yelling in a faux Bronx accent: “Learn to park like you’re in da city! Ride that bumpah! This ain’t Lake Wobegon! That era’s over in this town!” Then you’ve hit big-time.

Minnesota Nice has its limits. You can't find parking? Blame the "nice" folks who can't park bumper to bumper in da city… pic.twitter.com/I9AosIeBUc — FredMelo, Reporter (@FrederickMelo) December 2, 2017

Aside from the Vulcan Krewe and Lance Brunious, the dapper trumpeter, soup samples were the main draw on sidewalk corners that day, which is a delicious start. But we could use a few more outdoor performers in this town. In New Orleans’ French Quarter, I found kids playing tubas on the street toward midnight, and crowds of polite tourists forming to cheer them on.

This was, mind you, on a Tuesday night in the off-season.

Sure, late-night tubas would be heresy in the milder Midwest. Still, I caught a hint of that homegrown vibe during the Little Mekong Night Market and all-night arts festival, Northern Spark, which took place along the St. Paul-Minneapolis Green Line last June. We need more vibe like that in this town.

With the right push, St. Paul could be the kind of place you lie to your parents to get to, the kind of place you stay up all night taking in music, philosophizing, breaking curfew and staring at the stars.