Market #8: Happy, Happy Village!

There's really no great way to illustrate the blissful vibe of Saturday's Market. It can't be captured in pixels or on this page, but I'll give it a go. From first thing in the morning, the whole Marketplace seemed to me to be filled with really really happy smiling laughing chatty friendly people. More than usual, everybody was happy to be there and see each other. Everybody wanted to visit and joke and hang out. It was so much fun just to be in the middle of it! I kept thinking "wow, this is one happy village..."

So here's my theory of the origin of the Great Bliss Out. All week long the weatherfolk were getting us ready for a dismal holiday weekend. I shop around for the weather on Friday mornings when I do the newsletter, looking for the most upbeat prediction, usually the NOAA or Intellicast suffice nicely. The best I could come up with was "A chance of showers, with thunderstorms also possible after 11 am. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 67. Northwest wind at 9 mph becoming southwest. Chance of precipitation is 30%." D'oh! Not a pretty picture! Nobody with merchandise to sell in the great outdoors relishes the thought of being out in a thunderstorm with their goods. And nobody with a free Saturday on their hands looks out into a thunderstorm and thinks "I'll just head off to the Market right this minute!" So everybody heads off to bed on Friday night expecting to spend the day inside playing Scrabble or whatever people do inside on a Saturday when they're not at work.

Saturday morning arrives and lo, a bright light in the blazing blue heavens has appeared! Here comes the sun, little darlin'! Folks have abandoned their long weekend camping plans due to pessimistic weatherfolk and high gas prices, so they all come down to their hometown gathering spot, the Market. They see their friends, they eat lunch, they shop for the things they need and want, they hang out and listen to music and dance and laugh and talk and talk and talk. And all the while they are sooooo happy that it's not awful outside! It's not blazing hot, it's not soaking wet, it's JUST RIGHT! And on a Saturday?! An Oregon springtime dream come true.

That was the highlight of my day, just being there, in the happy village. After 560some Saturdays spent at the Market on the Park Blocks it does amaze me that I can still be enthralled, amused and uplifted by the place...

Saturday Market #7: Yes, It Was Hot Enough For Me

It was hot enough for me at 9:30 in the morning. After the thermometer started reading 90+ I felt pretty much like these irises. Very wilty. A few days to work up to it would have been nice, but no. And now we're back to the chilly days of intermittent rain. This spring has been particularly Oregonian!

At some point in the later afternoon I ventured over to the row of 4x4 booths along West Park. They really bear the brunt of the heat, and they have to look at the thermometer on the Cascade Title building all day long. As I was commiserating about the heat and looking at all the cool new stuff like these hula hoops,



and these cute hemp bracelets,


a cheerful voice greeted me with a "Hi Kim!" Turns out it was Kathie Farmer (now Lundberg) who I went to school with starting in Mrs. Steven's first grade class at Edgewood Elementary here in Eugene. It was her first Saturday selling at the Market, her friends had been encouraging her to sell her collaged switchplates and rocks, and they are really different and stylish. I hope she wasn't too daunted by the weather and comes back next week! Here are her creations:

I always love running into people that I went to grade school with, and it happens a lot around here...

A lot of other stuff happens around here too, cool weird stuff like this purple flower sitting next to the stage for a while, next to this woman with perfectly matching purple hair. They didn't seem to be related, the flower left long before the woman did.

And like these folks running through the Market with giant pills as the Pojama People were playing Zappa tunes.

The day seemed like a beautiful crazy work of multidimensional collage art by the time I went home. Or maybe I was just too hot.

Saturday Market #6: Our Mothers Day Traditions

Saturday Market is an innovative place. Every week new products, new vendors, new visitors... But it's also a place of traditions and Mothers Day brings some of those around. First off there's finding something for Mom. I was on one of my very brief photo forays and these quilt and button hearts caught my eye. So I took the shot and was just about to wander on when the little voice in my head said "Mom would love that!" and so I bought it. And Little Voice was right, she does love it.

It's also our tradition to give stuff away, pretty much like door prizes, except we have no door. Vendors give me stuff, really nice stuff, like jewelry, including a gorgeous silver and set stone pendant from Greg and Mary Kuhnle, and a stained glass kaleidoscope with pressed flowers to view from Larry Pagen, and pottery and clothing and soaps and the list goes on and on, fifty or so artisans giving me seventy five gifts to distribute. Every time I stepped away from the stage, somebody would hand me stuff. That is just so cool. And every hour we drew names out of the basket and gave stuff away. This time I had help one time from my son Victor, and another time from my Mom, Maron. Fortunately she didn't notice the quilt heart laying right there on top of the sound board, phew! As always, a splendid time was had by all, especially those folks who got to pick a goodie from the choices I laid out on the steps in front of the stage.


Another fine tradition, getting out a week before and finding a mother artisan whose child is also on site to photograph for my ads. This time out I found Karen Nunley and Sierra Nunley-Gross. Bonus points for them both being Market Vendors in their own rights! Karen has just started with her Holy Donuts, and Sierra has been selling her Oh, Snap! handbags, wallets and other accessories for a couple of years. Dad Jimmy Manigrossi also sells his pet tags in the booth, but didn't make it into the photo this time around. I love how the handbag matches the donuts! And the smiles of course...


The day always wraps up with a set by marimba band Kudana. I can't even remember when we started doing it this way, but it sure feels just right. I bet Kudana has been around the longest of all Eugene's many marimba bands, and their multi-generational merry band always brings joy to the Park Blocks. We actually haven't had a lot of luck with the marimba band/sunny days thing this year, but it didn't really rain and the sun very nearly broke through the clouds a couple of times. I picked this particular shot of them because I love the sentiment expressed on Kayte's hoodie "Make Life Iller." Yeah, let's keep doing that!

Looks like a hot one coming at us this weekend, 80+ degrees?! Better go start on the sunscreen right now...

Saturday Market #5: YouTube, the New Frontier

I've been thinking about this for a couple of years, and not getting around to it. Getting a blog going was the big cyberspace expansion two years back, and the Flickr photostream was last year's web adventure. So finally over the winter I figured out that my digital camera actually does OK with video, and then I figured out how to post videos on YouTube. It's pretty exciting really, but kind of daunting. Just doing the basic "getting it out there" is simple. Making it actually look reasonable, that's going to take some fiddling and fussing. So here it is, my first Market YouTube video. It looks all blurry and awful, and I'm going to be working on that, but it sounds pretty good.

Luckily, the moment that I chose to record was a perfect one. This is Carl "Bus Man" Faddis. Along with being a fine performer with a glorious voice, he's an LTD bus driver. Lots of his riders turn up to see him when he plays, and so he played them this special song, "Bus Riders in the Sky." As you can see he's got a great sense of humor as well, and lots of supporters in the audience...



I've got a couple of clips from opening day to add as well, and I'm planning on adding other stuff, not just music clips, but little interviews and a walk or two through the place. I've also been looking at other people's Market videos. There are a couple of recently posted clips from June of 1992 that are fun to watch. It was just a couple of months after I started as assistant manager, and since it's from the stage area, I saw myself wander through, and had to wonder at my clothing choice for the day (just like most people do every week). I also saw lots of familiar faces, folks that are still there dancing in front of the stage every Saturday afternoon. Sixteen years later, that's really cool and really Eugene. I've favorited these clips, so you can find them by clicking here to go to my YouTube channel.

Meanwhile, I've been contemplating adding a MySpace page to the Market's cyberempire, but I'm still undecided on that one. I think I'll take the time to perfect the video thing first. Really, the place is so actual rather than virtual, so much more analog than digital, it's hard to do it justice out here in the ether...

Saturday Market #4: Just Right!

Only week four and they seem to have gotten the thermostat adjusted! It was a perfect sunny day, not too hot, not too cold, not too bright or dark, just exactly right. It felt great and everybody seemed very happy to be there. The weather perfected itself just in time for my monthly photo tour of the Market. I try to get out and take photos every Saturday, but the last Saturday of the month it's imperative that I get out and find all the photos I need to do my monthly website update. I need pix for the front page and the photo page, which I usually have enough of, but I also need photos of new products and the Beautiful Booth of the Month.

So I dash out during stage sets that seem likely to proceed successfully without my supervision (it almost always works out anyway), put my eyeballs on and look for promising shots. I found this lovely collection of marquetry boxes right in my own backyard just about, down the steps at Steven DeLang's booth.



The row of 4x4 booths on the edges of the West Block is always a great place to spot the new products, like these cute cute baby onesies by Rosalee Reynolds.


Then cruising through the West Block, I found an entire color-coordinated neighborhood! I bet they didn't plan it that way, but it looks really good.


I even made it over to Farmers' Market, where various plant starts are always the highlight of the first month or so.


And it's always fun to take the Beautiful Booth shots, to settle in and get familiar with someone's work for a little while. Susan Fishel is the Beautiful Booth owner this month, here's one of my favorite photos of her work, teamed up with Mother Nature's.


You can head over to the Saturday Market website to see the rest of what I found. It looks like we could get another "just right" Saturday this week, so see you there!