Memorable Memorial Day at the Northwest Folklife Festival

Memorial Day has come and gone. After an unpromising-looking gray Friday, Saturday rolled in bright and hot, the kind of weather that made David look up at the sky and say, "Oh, Seattle, how could I stay mad at you for what you did to me last winter?"



We went down to the Northwest Folklife Festival at Seattle Center, an annual four-day event with hundreds of music and dance performances and workshops. We hung out for part of the time with Barry and Tirtza, who come up from San Francisco for the festival every year (Tirtza is a dedicated folk dancer).

David & I ended up spending all Saturday and Sunday at the festival. We saw the Raging Grannies, a chorus of senior women who write their own political song parodies (one of their better ones was a song about Bush and Cheney, "Unimpeachable," to the tune of Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable"). Here's a video of them singing another one of their parodies, an antiwar song to the tune of "One Little, Two Little, Three Little Indians."



Late on Saturday afternoon we took in the first two acts of the "Folk Punk Attack" program. Blackbird Raum billed itself as a "vitriolic punk jug band," with accordion, banjo, and raspy, howling vocals. They were pretty cool, actually; we bought the CD. Next was Chervona, a "gypsy folk jazz punk" band from Portland whose members mostly come from Russia and the Ukraine. ("Chervona" means "red and beautiful" in Ukrainian.) They were a blast; we bought their CD too. Here's a video of Chervona.



At one point during the Blackbird Raum set, a young guy came running past us through the crowd saying, "Someone's shooting a gun over there!" We didn't know if that was true or not, but, concerned about the possibility of a stampede, we got up and moved away, until it looked like things had calmed down. It turned out that there had in fact been a shooting, possibly unintentional, during a fight one lawn over from where we were. A single bullet was fired and hit a couple of bystanders, but fortunately the shooter was arrested and no one was seriously injured. It was the first such incident in the 37 years of the festival.

Other stuff on Saturday: an Irish folk dancing workshop where David got partnered up for a reel with one of the most accomplished dancers in the room, a redheaded young woman wearing bona fide dancing shoes whom David referred to as "Colleen McIrish." David managed to hold his own during a vigorous dance involving much skipping and sweating, though afterward he exclaimed (between gasps), "Colleen McIrish tried to kill me!" Later we saw a very good local acoustic guitar trio called Lost Pedro, and ended the night in one of the beer gardens, watching the last couple of acts in the "Loonie Tunes" Canadian showcase.

Sunday's highlights included performances of Hawaiian music and dance by a number of local groups, an eight-man a capella group singing folk songs from the Balkans, the Liar's Contest (a tall tale competition), a huge room filled with festivalgoers participating in contra dances, and a showcase of local Brazilian drum and dance groups.

And that’s just a partial list of the stuff we saw and did; you have to understand that for every performance or workshop we went to, there were two dozen other workshops and performances going on simultaneously in different venues around Seattle Center. And it wasn't just Saturday and Sunday, when we went, but Friday and Monday as well. And admission to all this is free, though a ten-dollar donation per person per day is requested. Pretty incredible, when you think about it. No wonder we needed to sleep in on Monday.

Accidental early birds

Gentle readers in California latitudes (for I know that’s where all two or three of you live), do you know what time sunrise is up here these days? 5:21 a.m. And even though “sun” is just a theoretical construct that can only be assumed and not actually observed, it does result in the phenomenon of “light” — gray light, but light nonetheless — entering our bedroom at around 5:00 a.m. We’ve therefore been waking up at the very uncharacteristic hour of five in the morning. (My parents know how uncharacteristic this is for us; when we stay with them in San Diego they have to pretend that lunch is breakfast.) Usually we just toss about in denial, but this morning David actually got out of bed because he had to get to the airport to go to Boise to give a presentation for work. As I lay there not getting back to sleep, it occurred to me that I could just get up and prepare a lentil soup to cook in the Crock-Pot during the day, so that it would be ready to eat when David got back from Boise tonight.

So that’s what I did. I had to check the kitchen clock a few times to convince myself that, yes, I really was wide awake and sautéing an onion at five-thirty in the morning. If this trend of runaway productivity keeps up, I’ll have taken over the world by the summer solstice.

While it is nice to have natural light to wake up to, it would be better if it appeared when we were ready to get up, and not before. At least we’re not in Fairbanks; we do get more than eight hours of darkness, so falling asleep is not a problem. Then again, if we did live in Fairbanks, we’d probably just accept reality and tape black garbage bags over the window.

Escaping from the aliens in a kayak

We just had a little heat wave in Washington state, with temperatures in the eighties and nineties. The Seattle Times prints a color weather map of the state on the back page of the local section, and ever since we got here, the usual pattern going west to east has been: a vertical stripe of dark green on the coast, then a vertical stripe of lighter green over Puget Sound, then another vertical stripe of dark green over the Cascades, then more light green and occasionally, lately, yellow over the rest of the state to the east. But one day toward the end of last week, the whole state was covered in yellow and orange. The sight disturbed me; it looked wrong; it suggested that an extraterrestrial invasion had taken place. (I realized later that sunshine could actually qualify as that around here.)

We took advantage of the weather by going kayaking on Lake Union on Saturday. Unfortunately, everyone and his uncle with a motorboat had the same idea, and the lake was crowded with yahoos and yachts, not to mention the commercial floatplanes, which were constantly landing and taking off. The fumes were overpowering at times, until most everyone had motored out of Lake Union to much bigger waters in Lake Washington to the east or the Sound to the west. Then it was relaxing and fun. We paddled past the houseboats on the east side of the lake, many of which had been fixed up nicely and had extensive displays of sculptures and paintings outside facing the water. We then paddled under a pedestrian bridge to a tiny bay on the south end of the lake where there were a number of Canada geese and a few goslings milling about on the lawn. One goose (or gander — I can’t tell them apart) noticed us drifting closer and exclaiming over the goslings; the bird rose up and raised its wings threateningly, and we paddled off. Scared by a goose — well, they are pretty big birds. We finished up with an afternoon snack of sushi and beer on a restaurant’s shaded patio by the lake’s edge.

No pictures — I didn’t want to risk getting my camera wet. Just take my word for it; it was actually sunny and hot here, for once.

Give us mud, but give us tulips

Last Saturday we drove about 60 miles north — almost halfway to Vancouver, B.C. — to the town of Mount Vernon in Skagit (rhymes with “Padgett”) Valley to see the tulip fields. There are several commercial tulip growers who open their fields to the public in April and early May, and during the entire month of April the towns of Skagit Valley celebrate the Tulip Festival. The festival itself was over by the time we visited, but we still got to walk through the fields. It rained lightly the whole time we were there, but in a way that was a good thing, because it meant that we were able to get especially beautiful pictures.

(All photos mine except for the one of me and the closeup of the yellow tulip, which David took.)

In terms of appliances

If San Francisco is known as the air-conditioned city, then Seattle is the city that climbed into the refrigerator and closed the door. It's still cold here, especially in the shade of the downtown buildings the closer I get to Elliott Bay. I imagine this might be what it feels like to walk in the radiant chill next to a glacier's icy bulk. The numbers on the thermometer don't explain it — the highs have been in the fifties, the lows in the forties. By those numbers, it's really not that cold. I think the numbers that explain it best are the ones on the calendar: 5 and 1. It's the first of May, and I am still wearing my winter coat, wool hat, scarf, and gloves. (My coat needs cleaning, but I don't think there will be three days when I won't need it.) Feeling cool to cold most of the year is nothing new to me, coming from San Francisco. But feeling this cold? This late? Seattle, is this really necessary?