Saturday Market #26: Desperately Seeking Inspiration

It's that Holiday Market poster time of year again. Last Saturday I had no clue what I would do this time around. Wednesday was the committee meeting and deadline to have something in hand. OK, I had one clue, just a thought of curly or swirly something. I also knew that once I got out and started looking, something would occur to me.

As the day wore on, and the stage was kind of complicated with a no-show and some timing issues, I was afraid that I wouldn't have time to find "it." Finally, at 3:45 or so, I got away from the stage and started to look. Not really looking for swirly things specifically, by now I was just looking for anything. Looking back through my photos from the day, I can see that swirly curly was catching my eye, in Ayala's booth (on a hat) and in Amy Clancy's booth (part of a little kid hat):



So then, Katy Jane came up and asked if I'd take a picture of her and her husband, Patrick Conlin, for the poster. And there, in their booth, was "IT"! Patrick's gorgeous copper vessel with the sorta Art Deco, maybe even more Arts & Crafts style, definitely inspirational form and handles. Aaaahhh! The perfect focal point!



On the drive home I was contemplating the vessel, and a conversation I'd had with Dru Marchbanks from the Holiday Market committee about how to emphasize "buy local" and "made in Oregon" in some way that didn't use either of those phrases. I think they've become sort of invisible through over use. "Made by Hand" and "Close to Home" suddenly appeared in my head and I think together those phrases say that and more. I let all that swirl around my brain for a day, and by late late Sunday night I had a poster mock-up that I really liked. Fortunately, so did the committee folk. Now I've just got to get some great photos of Marketeers to add to the mix as usual, and soon enough you'll be seeing the Holiday Market poster.

Thanks, Patrick and Katy!!

Saturday Market #24 & 25: A Dream of a Eugenie Celebration Weekend

Hmmm, I Dream of Eugenie? OK, so not my favorite Celebration theme, but it's not about the theme, it's about the Celebrating of Eugeneliness! Always a long weekend for Marketeers, and always a much better weekend when the weather is spot-on perfect awesomeness from start to finish. Sun! Lots of sun! and not much in the way of heat in the day or cold at night, just a most clement sunny and 78 kind of weekend.

For me, it started with the mile-long Saturday morning stroll that is the Celebration Parade. For the past few years, we've been a part of the Unique Eugene entry, which is always lots of fun. This time I had 10 Marketeers along for the walk! It was great to be so well represented. Thanks to the Karen Nunley and the Holy Donut gang, Bill Allord, Shane Schaeffer, Autumn Breeze Sanger and Mary Hebert for coming along. We also had the beautiful flower bedecked bikes and riders from Passionflower, a whole bunch of Paul Nicholson impersonators from Paul's Bicycle Way of Life, kids wearing giant paint pallettes from Oregon Art Supply, remote control vehicles of all kinds from Eugene Toy and Hobby, a variety of walking fruits and veggies from Sundance, and the best band in the history of parades, the Pacific Winds band riding in pedicabs. Plus the biggest green balloons ever. Here's the Market gang:



As soon as I got back from the parade, it was full on showtime for the rest of the day. I don't think I even stepped away from the stage until late in the day. Of course I do my best to make the stage extra festive for the weekend with a little extra musical whiplash/culture shock thrown in for good measure. Beth Rose put on one of her great Youth Music Showcases, starring students of Scotty Perey, to a completely packed house. The Swinging Marmalukes swinging covers of unexpected tunes (Led Zeppelin on ukulele, mandolin and bass anyone?) and Americanistan with their middle eastern dancers were great. My fave of the day, though, was Calango. Energetic, joyous Brazilian dance music on a breezy late summer afternoon had everybody up and dancing and celebrating in a most Eugenie way.



The Touchy Feeliacs and Vibe Nation rounded out the long day. My reward for the long Celebration Saturday is always seeing the place all lit up in the evening with folks hanging out and enjoying themselves. Again, much more rewarding when it's not raining!



More musical variety on Sunday, as we started with Acoustic Etouffee swamp stomp style music, then Accordions Anonymous and their delicious mix of polka, tango, folk, rock and whatever else they cook up. The day ended up with Planet Loop, which was great, but my highlight of Sunday was the set before theirs - Kef, a Balkan music ensemble that is just amazing to me. It sounds so complicated, and yet they seem to play it so effortlessly...



It's also nice to have company around the blocks, as the Sustainability (or sometimes Community) Causeway wraps around us in the Park Streets for the weekend:



And on Sunday on the West block this interesting and informative display about solar energy:



So, all in all, if it's gotta be a long weekend, it might as well be a dreamy one! I had fun, hope you did too... If you haven't had enough, you can have a look at all my pix from the weekend here on Flickr

FAME! well, sorta, for a second anyway...

Yes! Me! Quoted in the Wall Street Journal?! Yes, in a front page article about the S.L.U.G. Queen coronation. As the author, Mary Pilon said in her alert email yesterday morning, "Right below a heinously depressing story about the collapse of Wall Street as we know it..." Hmmm, the end of civilization and me and the Queens in the Wall Street Journal - cause and effect, or just really awesome timing?

You can read the whole thing, plus see a video and some photos here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122203411663760967.html

As always, I thought my quote was kind of pedestrian,

"There are people who don't like the slug queen, who are embarrassed by it," says Kim Still, the pageant organizer. "But we just keep doing it."

but it did the job. I was hoping to score with a quippier but far more confusing and perhaps too-glib-for-WSJ line - "We take not taking ourselves seriously very seriously here."

I got quoted in the New York Times a few years back too, in a travel article about Eugene. I'm chipping away at those 15 minutes of fame a few words at a time, I guess... It took a friend's suggestion to figure out where to even buy a copy of the Wall Street Journal in Eugene, but $2 at Safeway and I've got another page for my scrapbook!

Catching Up Part 3: What I Would Have Went On About

Had I been writing about the past three weeks, I most certainly would have mentioned how worthwhile it is to go out and see Michael Conley wherever he might be playing. He'll be playing Holiday Market some time, haven't settled it yet. I think he has a gorgeous voice, and writes great songs. He played last year with the Spruce Root Band and when they dissolved, I was sad! but glad again when Michael got in contact about solo gigs. Go see him!



I also would have gone on and on about the Michael Tracey Band. To be honest, I'm not a huge blues fan. But I am most definitely a Michael Tracey fan, and again, go find him and enjoy! He took a break from playing too, and boy was I happy to hear that he was back and wanting a Market gig. Wonderful voice, great original song writing, super solid backing band. Totally enjoyable!



For sure I would have written about Sweet Papa Lowdown with Julie Stoike on vocals, followed by Brian Cutean with Margareta Waterman and Ivory Pike, and ending up with Apocalypso back on the 6th. Julie is a great addition as vocalist with Sweet Papa Lowdown, yes another delicious voice to listen to:



Then Brian Cutean shared his set with Southern Oregon poet Margareta Waterman and this lovely woman, Ivory Pike:



She's a young woman with Down Syndrome, and she's also a young woman with talent on the harmonica. She's played many times for family gatherings and the like, but this was her first true public performance. She did a great job, and the crowd really enjoyed her music. I love that our Market Stage is a place where many many people have their first public performance, and keep right on performing and going places with their music and poetry and dance. The whole Market is like that for artists of all kinds. I'm so glad Brian invited Ivory to play with him, and Margareta Waterman's poetry was a great addition as well. The whole set was a true treat.

We wrapped up the perfect, sunny late summer day with Apocalypso, a steel drum band. It was just the right mellow, happy feel for the end of the day.



OK, that gets me up to the most recent past, all the fun and excitement of Eugene Celebration! Blogging soon on that one...

Catching Up Part 2: My Brain on SLUGs Again

Guess this could be construed as off-topic as well, but it's what kept me from blogging, so here I go again: Right after the Frida Adventure, it was time for the S.L.U.G. Queen Coronation! After last year's extra extravaganza, it was nice to be more sluggish and take the low "let's put on a show" road for a change.

In my humble First Lady In Waiting opinion, this was the best one ever. There were six contestants who were all fairly organized and together, compared to some other years. Make that five fairly organized, one supremely organized. Thanks in part to the excellent publicity garnered by the supremely organized Marie Slugtoinette, the crowd was really really big! Maybe even bigger than last year. The house band was great - Rich Glauber with Dave O'Toole on sax and Kenny Sokolov on drums - they provided some crowd pleasing settling in music with the divine Miss Savanah Coen on vocals, and then gave nice little fill in pieces where needed and accompanied the Queens in their "50 Ways to Love Your Mother" piece and a couple of contestants as well. And the weather? Absolutely sublime! Here are the Old Queens waiting for the show to start:



It's hard to take photos and run the show and enjoy the show all at the same time, so the pics are generally sketchy. And how can you adequately report on such a crazy thing? It was a true competition this year. Ambassador Mucous Molluscadia was second runner up, his half-male, half-female "Age of Androgynous" piece was brilliant. Lady Slugiva definitely caused a stir when she rode in on a real live horse, and had the crowd roaring with approval for her rendition of "Summerslime." But Marie Slugtoinette won the day with her musical medley and her eight months of over the top bribery. Check out her slugqueeneugene.com for a comprehensive history of S.L.U.G., it's quite impressive! Here's a pretty bad picture of her:



For those who were there, and are wondering how the hat-passing went, we did indeed raise enough money to cover the expenses of putting on the show, and buying wristbands for all the contestants so they could Celebrate, plus a bit left over to start next year's extravaganza. Thanks to all who witnessed the event, we wouldn't do it without you! Here's a fraction of the assembled masses:

Catching Up Part 1: The Frida Kahlo Adventure

This one may sound a bit off topic, but it started at Holiday Market. And it was extremely fun. So I deem it blog-worthy and here I go!

Back in December of last year, I told all about Dress Up Days at Holiday Market, you can rummage back and read up if you like. Short version: At Holiday Market, we pick a theme for each day, we dress up. Due to the nature of some of our eyebrows, Frida Kahlo Day was a natural pick, and we've Frida'd up every year for a long time.

Back in July of last year, July 6 to be exact, it was Frida's 100th birthday. Also a Friday, also a First Friday Art Walk. So it was natural that we pay homage in our favorite way, and dress up and go out on the town as Frida Kahlo. So Cindia, Kate, Gay and I wandered around, amused people, confused people, caused photos to occur, and had fun with it. I posted some photos on my personal Flickr site, and they've gotten a lot of looks.

Back in March of this year, I was contacted by a woman in the education department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern art about using one of the photos in a wall display on Frida Kahlo's legacy during their Frida Kahlo retrospective. What?! A Frida Kahlo Retrospective in San Francisco!! Hard to remember whether I was more excited about being included, or the fact that there would be a great Frida show close enough to see.

So of course I said yes, and here's the photo they chose:



We Fridas made a date to go and see the show in August. The whole affair drifted into the background for the spring and early summer. And then, one afternoon, at Market, I was walking by Shanna Trumbly's booth and she stopped me. "I was just in San Francisco, and I went to the Frida Kahlo exhibit, and there was a picture of YOU at the end!!" Wow! What a thing to hear at the end of a long day! And I kept hearing that story from various people for the next few weeks. It's one thing to send off the photo and wonder if they'll use it or not. To hear reports - that's pretty exciting!

So our August date arrived and I headed south. Only two of us could go as it turned out, but our third original Frida Kate had commissioned three amazing Frida Kahlo dolls from Marketeer Vicki Getchell, so our three Frida dolls made the trip as well. Here they are on their way to see the show at SFMOMA:



The retrospective was truly amazing and inspirational. I'd only seen a few of her works in person before, so to see so many, and so many photos of her, wow. What a bright being, and shining so brightly through all the circumstances of her life! I appreciated her work before, but now I'd say I'm devoted. Of course we were dressed up, and many many people had fun with us, taking our pictures, asking us why... We accidentally cause a little mob scene outside the gift shop and had to move! And not one person asked if we were being Carmen Miranda or the Rosarita Refried Bean Lady (which is what we hear here in town sometimes). At the end of the show, sure enough, the photo of us, along with a couple of others of women dressed as La Kahlo. Here we are - not the greatest photo, but you get the idea:



and here with "Fridarazzi" outside the gift shop:



We stayed in character for the rest of the day as we traipsed about San Francisco, and everywhere we went, people were happy to see us. One guy in traffic even rolled down his window at a stop sign and said "Frida, is that you?"

But really, one day of fame and paparazzi was plenty for me. It was reeeaaallly fun, though! We continued sightseeing, as civilians, the next day, but took our Frida dolls along and snapped pix of them in all kinds of places. One of these days soon I'll put those pix into my Flickr stream so all the world can enjoy the Frida Kahlo Adventure.

Yikes! I am so behind on blogging!

It wasn't supposed to be like this. But it is like this. I have great things to blog about. Like my trip to San Francisco to see the Frida Kahlo show that has a photo of some of the Market Kahlo lovers dressed as Frida on the wall! So photos coming from that. And I'll have some S.L.U.G. Queen stories to tell, as the coronation is tonight.

So a couple of days off to go to S.F., and a S.L.U.G. Queen coronation on top of the monthly website update have kept me from my duties here on ye olde Blog. But I shall return next week with tales to tell and photos to post.

So stay tuned!