NW Folk Life Festival 2017
NW Folk Life Festival 2017
It Sucked, Except For The Characters
Seattle, WA - SUNDAY, May 28th
The Northwest Folk Life Festival is an annual event in Seattle where the city closes down a bunch of streets to let vendors hawk their wares and musicians perform on various stages. 99% of it was total crap. In fact, it was almost a joke of seeing how many people within the State of Washington they could find to sell kettle corn and freshly squeezed lemonade, which actually came from commercial jugs of trashy, chemically induced, diabetes-causing hogwash. Maybe, it's called folk life because attendees get dysentery. Who, knows?
The only reason to attend is for people watching. Whether it's crust-punk kids sitting on a hill playing songs with terribly ragged voices or strange new-agers blowing didgeridoos at people, it's all fantastic. The vendors, on the other hand, were seriously lacking in bringing anything interesting when compared to the guests. Unless, of course, you wanted to rock a bow-tie made of pornographic film stills or a general slew of ugly t-shirts, hats, dresses, etc... that all seem like they're from the same wholesale catalog.
As for the characters, I saw an old man in a women's bikini dancing on a grassy knoll and ran towards him to figure out what was going on. He had a cart filled with neon colored scarves and a little hand-painted sign that read, "Free Hugs & Kisses." In the midst of filming his antics with my phone, a random dude in shorts came up and said, "That's Beau, he's a fucking legend around here. Don't kiss him because he's been eating bread and he'll try to spit in your mouth when he makes out with you." Upon closer inspection it was apparent that his tummy was covered in skin tags and thousands of polyps were bursting off his flesh like sand castles. So, I kept a fair distance.
Another interesting character was a white kid whose dreadlocks were so thick that he had a carabiner in them holding onto a stuffed-animal head. His girlfriend was holding a hand puppet of a dragon and their friend had a turtle shell backpack with a doll sticking out of it. No big deal, except for the fact that the doll was blinking its eyes; making it terrifying to behold.
I also saw a group of police officers standing next to a paramedic vehicle smoking cigars. It was bizarre and I wanted to take a photo of it, but I was too scared. I'm working on overcoming my fear of documenting interesting people doing interesting things. Hopefully, I can get some better shots in the future.