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Seattle Center Folklife Festival
When we emerged from the Experience Music Project (I still don't know if "experience music" is supposed to be a command or a descriptor) onto the Seattle Center grounds, the Folklife Festival was in full swing. As it were. There was lots of dancing and our first stop was at the Exhibition Hall, one of over a dozen dance and music venues at the Center that week-end, to enjoy the "Louisiana Dance Party." We had missed the Cajun Two-Step lessons, but saw plenty of folks who could do it really well. And we left before the Cajun Jitterbug lessons, which I didn't notice in the program until later that day, so we probably didn't get the full effect. It was lots of fun though and got us in the mood to go wandering and see what we could see.
We browsed all kinds of cool crafts, art, jewelry, etc. and I bought some emu oil for my developing arthritis -- all those years in the marble halls of the State Capitol are starting to catch up with my knees. I'll let you know how it does. Jeffi and I had some exotic lunch -- deepfried something, Sheila sensibly got noodles and chicken satay, but, then, she was driving. And I bought a soda from a group of punkie homeless teens selling soda-pop. They would apparently go to a store and buy a 12-pack of pop, then set up beside one of the paths and shout out "Soda! 50 cents!" When I decided to maybe give it a try, I said "Okay guys, is this soda dead warm?" "Well, it's not so bad," said the articulate one, "we've been drinking it." So I handed him 50 cents (he let me feel the can first) and it really wasn't so bad, at least compared to the $1.50 the stands were charging for a soda.
There were some great acts, many, many more than we caught and everything we watched was great. There was the Bosnia-Herzegovina doo-wop group, old-timey picking' and singin', juggling and tumbling, a poor college student trying to raise money by playing the violin, a young man playing guitar singing away even though you could not hear him, with a sign that said "Please contribute to my amp and microphone fund," Hawaiian dancers, men in kilts, serious, black-clad women rolling harps along the path. Something for absolutely everyone. It was sometimes hard to tell the legitimate, scheduled acts from the "volunteers."
One act that we think was scheduled, that we particularly enjoyed was Scotty, the Magician. While he was trying to escape from a strait-jacket, Scotty said he was half-Houdini in that Houdini had died at 52 and he, Scotty, was 26. He had a very charming manner and even more charming patter and we stayed for the whole show (well, he almost cried--jokingly I'm pretty sure--whenever anyone left). Here he is getting out of a straight jacket ala Houdini.  And this is a sample of his slightly offbeat humor. To one of his guinea pigs "Pick a card, any card, but you have to remember it. Otherwise the ending to this trick tends to be a little obscure." He was a decent magician, too, and nice to the kids who eagerly volunteered to help him.
Then there was the performance art girl, who almost certainly was a volunteer. She was white, wore a turquoise "do rag" hat with ears and black clothes. She had elaborate black lines painted on her very pretty, doll-like face and stood on the paved path on an elaborate colored chalk design she had drawn. She also had a naked dolly (can't remember if it was painted black), a dead computer keyboard, and a kind of Goth boyfriend lolling about in the background. He appeared to be protection, not part of the act. Her performance seemed to be chewing gum? tobacco? her tongue? and soundlessly questioning, admiring, soothing and punishing the dolly with the keyboard shoved into the front of her pants. We gave her a dollar but didn't have a clue.
Jeffi's favorite was a quintessential Seattle neo-grunge group called either the Posties or the Pasties. The lead singer/rapper was a young white girl with a dog tied to her ankle. The drummer had two snares and a "kick-drum," which was actually a suitcase. Then there was a trumpet player, and guitar and bass, I guess. All of them pretty ragged and most of them pretty dirty. And they played pretty darn good. They had a CD which we now regret we didn't buy.
All in all a grand day. And to top it off we went to dinner at 13 Coins which has been around forever and isn't quite as good as I remembered, but pretty good (the site starts with a flash movie, so be prepared). And when I asked for a glass of wine that was dryer than the first one I had, the waiter brought me an empty glass and said, "There! dry enough for you?" Grouchy waiters are part of their schtick, and ours was terribly good at being rude.
The next day was going-home day, but we did go down to the waterfront and fool around, riding the trolley up and down, looking around in a mostly-deserted Pioneer Square (like the Pike Place Market, now grown to about 10 square blocks), admiring the cruise ships and all the junk at Ye Olde Curiosity Shop--which gets points for avoiding Shoppe, but loses them for Olde (they don't appear to have a web site, but here's a little something from Roadside America. The shrunken heads and fudge are both excellent, though, each in its own way.
For our last hurrah, we had lunch at the Edgewater on Pier 67 at their restaurant called Six Seven (who knows why?). Another quintessential Seattle experience, even though in a hotel chain, the decor might be called industrial-west-coast-timber-chic. The building support columns seem to have been created by carefully skinning the bark off a tree and then reassembling the bark around a 4-sided stainless steel post, leaving the corners sticking out. There also are chandeliers, a river rock fire place, a wall of TV sets showing a moose walking through the woods and a magnificent view of Elliott Bay. This set of photos will give you a small idea -- try photo # 10. The daily soup special was miso soup. The "bread" served with the salads was rosemary crackers. The table bouquet was bowl of growing wheatgrass. The food was all wonderful.
So, well-fed and well-entertained by Seattle, we drove back down I-5 to Portland, stopping only once to check out the Outlets in Centralia. Portland seemed a little dull and a little white after our outing, but we were glad to be
home, anyway.
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