Sunday, May 28

Another sunny 80+ summer day in Seattle.  We went to the Folklife festival at Seattle Center for the first time ever.  Lucked into a perfect, free street parking spot in the shade of some trees.  Folklife is multiple scenes/locations of singing and dancing.  Our first stop was a beer garden for a cool one.  We lingered there to watch a couple of different Mexican groups sing and dance to mariachi music at the adjacent stage.  Then wandered around people watching,  The center fountain was a mob scene with kids and young people, along with a few oldsters!, playing in the water.  Ate a delicious vegetable piroshki from Kaleenka.  Highlight of the day, and what drew us to Folklife, was a chance to sing along with several hundred people to Pete Seeger songs.  There were three or four musicians who took turns leading songs.  Final song was "This Land is Your Land" which had me choked up and on the verge of tears.  The predictably liberal Seattle crowd really got into singing that one.  We made another stop at the beer garden, which fortunately had a bit of shade along one fence.  To top off our outing, as we left the center in the direction of our car, we found ourselves in front of a Taylor Shellfish location so in we went so Kathy could eat oysters.  I had a great salad with manchego cheese, currants, nuts in greens with a tasty dressing.

Monday, May 29

Seth would have been 35 years old today.  Here's a link to an appropriate poem which I learned about from seeing the Sam Elliott movie on Saturday:  Dirge Without Music   I do not approve and I am not resigned.

We stayed home on another lovely day and did not do much.  I mowed the lawn and Kathy worked on the bed beneath "Seth's tree".  It's a Korean dogwood that blooms in the late spring and in fact has flowers on it today.  We got a pizza from Flying Squirrel and watched some TV.  Saw an animated movie, "Sausages", that we'd heard about from Lauren & Sean.

Yesterday went to Egyptian Theater on Pine Street to see Sam Elliott and an advance screening of his new movie: "The Hero".  It was a package deal as part of the Seattle International Film Festival.  This was our first time to go to a SIFF event even though we've been here for 40 years.  It was hot sunny day and we had to stand in line for a while.

The movie was pretty good.  Sam played a dope smoking actor mainly getting by doing voice over work for commercials.  He's divorced and alienated from his daughter.  The action is kicked off by getting a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer which sets of reflections about his relationships, the work he has done,etc.  There's a scene in which Sam is reading lines with his pal for a possible role audition. The situation is a father talking to a daughter he's not seen for years and how he gradually convinces her that he's returned to save her from situation.  Elliott really nails the emotion of this conversation, which of course, has nuance due to the parallel father/daughter situation in his character's personal life.

After movie we walked to 11 & Pike neighborhood to "Chop House Row", a redeveloped older building to find, Marmite a restaurant I'd read about.  It was closed but it shares a space with "Spirit in the Bottle" and they were open for dinner.

We sat outside in a passageway through the middle of this complex of new buildings full of restaurants and crawling with lots of foot traffic.  Dinner was good.