Bumbershoot '03: Fri, Aug 29

Allrighty then — home from the first day of Bumbershoot 2003, pictures are downloaded to the ‘puter, and I’ve sorted through today’s set of 91 to find 10 to toss up here. Let day one begin…

I got to the Seattle Center around 12:30 or so, not long after everything got started, and spent the first couple hours just wandering around the grounds, figuring out this year’s layout. The International Fountain hadn’t been turned on full blast yet, and there were some seagulls hanging out on top of the globe drinking from the jets. I tried for a few shots of them, and I think this one with the Space Needle in the background was the best.

Le Petit Cirque is performing multiple times a day, with small fifteen minute shows throughout the day. This was the only one that I sat and watched, though I caught bits and pieces of other shows as I wandered around all day long. For this one, the pole in the center was constantly rotating around while the two performers worked their way up and down it. In this shot, the guy sticking out sideways was actually holding himself like that for one full revolution! Amazing to watch what these performers can do.

I think that this little wading pool has become one of my favorite places to kick back for a few minutes and cool off. Last year I didn’t come up this way, as I was only at Bumbershoot for one day, and the year before the pool was closed for renovations, so this was my first time actually seeing it in operation. It was quite a pleasant surprise to come across it, too — the water ranges from about six inches to maybe two feet deep, just right for wading around in (or swimming, if you’re young enough). I stopped by here a couple times during the day, both to wade around and to watch kids playing in the pool.

The first band I actually sat and watched some of today was Blues Orbiter. Not bad at all, good solid blues, but nothing really mindblowing, either. Made for a very pleasant time sitting in the grass and getting a little sun while I figured out what to do and where to go next, however. I ended up making a run through all the vendor booths and picking up a nice purple and black vest from one of the many imported goods stands. I’d been wanting a decent looking casual vest for a while, and this one is perfect — leaving it open leaves me cool and lets me get a little sun, but it’s heavy enough that later on in the night I buttoned it up and was quite comfortable.

Every year Bumbershoot has a giant puppet parade, and I’m always impressed with the imagination put into the creations. This dragon turned out to be quite friendly as I was taking the picture!

By this point it had gotten to about three in the afternoon, and I was getting fairly hungry. Rather than grabbing food at the festival, I caught the monorail into downtown Seattle and came home for a couple sandwiches, with a quick stop to pick up some shorts on the way. The day just kept getting warmer, and apparently the weather is supposed to hold throughout the weekend, so I wanted something a bit cooler than my standard black pants or jeans for my wandering. After eating, I caught the monorail back in, and took a quick peek at the odometer — the train I was on has clocked up 984,965.6 miles! As it’s roughly a one mile jaunt each way, that means that just one of those monorail trains has clocked up nearly 500,000 round trips. Blew my mind.

When I got back into the Seattle Center, I showed up just in time to catch Jambalassy featuring Alex Duncan. While I’m not normally a big reggae fan (I don’t dislike it, but it tends to be a bit too downtempo to really hold my interest for very long), I walked up to the show just in time to catch two really good dancy upbeat numbers that were an absolute blast. Really good rhythms, a strong four-piece horn section, and Alex does a really good job of getting the audience involved and having fun with the show. After those two numbers they moved into more standard downtempo songs, and I wandered off again. I’m so damn fickle sometimes. ;)

The International Fountain is one of my favorite places to kick back for a while on a sunny day. If you haven’t seen it before, it’s a huge area with a large dome in the center that has multiple outlets for jets of water that are constantly randomly changing how powerfully they send water out. Kids (of all ages) love to play in this, running in and out of the streams of water, dodging around them, and trying to run into the center and touch the dome itself without getting soaked (which they’re rarely, if ever, able to do). Being a sucker for watching kids play, this is perfect for me — and besides, a good breeze will often send some spray my way!

After watching kids soak themselves for a while, I headed off to find the Bagley-Wright theatre for the Pizzazz! talent competition. On my way there, I passed a group of five girls, all about 17 or so, standing in the center of one of the pathway intersections. One of them had a fresh henna “tattoo” on her lower back that said “KISS THIS” with an arrow pointing straight down, which gave me a laugh. They were all laughing and cheering one one girl in the center, who was wearing a shirt with “BIRTHDAY GIRL” hand lettered on it. As I came up to them, they were saying, “Seven! That’s seven — we need eight!” Then one of them saw me as I passed.

“Wanna be eight?”

“Eight what?”

“Kisses for the birthday girl!”

I laughed. “Oh, sure, why not?” I leaned in, gave the birthday girl a kiss on the cheek as her friends cheered, and then headed off again, hearing them continue their search — “That’s eight! Hey, wanna be nine?”

Eventually I found the theatre, and after waiting for about half an hour, they let us in. Apparently this is a fairly popular event, as they were able to almost completely fill the theater before the show started. The show itself was a blast — and while my friend Holly didn’t win, she did get some of the biggest laughs from the audience with a combination stand-up and burlesque routine extolling the virtues of having a fat ass. Besides, I think that anyone who comes on stage in lingerie and immediately addresses her audience as “twatwaffles and cockknockers” is bound to get a few laughs!

I have to say, though, that the winning act was well worth it. Opera Diva came out and sang an operatic piece with supertitles projected above her that were flat-out hilarious — and, of course, being a bear of very little brain, I can’t remember any of them well enough to get them written down here. Typical, eh? In any case, it was a great performance, and she definitely deserved her first place win. Apparently she’s one of the performers for local performance-art-circus-burlesque-dinner-theater Teatro Zinzanni, which I’d really like to check out one of these days.

The sun went down while I was inside watching the talent show, and at night, the entire Seattle Center area is absolutely gorgeous, especially during an event. My camera doesn’t do incredibly well with low-light shots, but I keep trying, and occasionally manage to get something that I think is presentable — such as this shot of the Space Needle behind the International Fountain. Someday I’ll be able to afford a better camera, but for now, this one serves me fairly well, and shots like this aren’t too bad.

My last band for the day was local funk/rock group Maktub. I’d read a lot of extremely good press about this group, but until now, hadn’t managed to catch any of their shows, so I was looking forward to seeing what all the fuss was about. Turns out that the good reviews were spot on — these guys were great. Very danceable funk/rock combination, incredible stage presence, and they were obviously having a blast and loving every moment of the show. The crowd was really good, too — I definitely got the impression that I was the only one there who hadn’t seen them before! Strongly considering grabbing one of their CDs before the weekend is over, but as I’d already done some shopping earlier, I didn’t want to blow too much money in one day.

Once Maktub finished up, I caught the monorail back to downtown and walked my way home — and that concludes day one of Bumbershoot 2003 for me. Three more days to go!