A couple weekends ago, I took an easy getaway to the Olympic Peninsula and camped in the Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge's Voice of America campground. It rained. Still, I needed time away to reflect on our losses.
First, we lost the Seattle Fringe Festival, gone astray to bankruptcy ($120,000 measly dollars). Now, in 2006, we'll no longer celebrate Gay Pride on Capitol Hill. I can hear their new theme song now, blaring with a special gay and lesbian choir on a giant rainbow - colored float, singing "Dooowntooown, everything's waiting for youuuu," and it just makes me sad.
But I was glad to read in Monday morning's P-I that 60 people showed up to the monthly Seattle Pride Committee's meeting on Sunday, July 17, protesting the move with a petition of more than 8,000 others who want Gay Pride to stay on Capitol Hill.
What I found most interesting in this article was how Pride Committee Chairman Frank Leonzal talked about how people just don't like change, which demeans and discounts not just the 8,000 people who signed the petition but the whole Gay Pride event.
It's funny, when change is needed (you know, like when something isn't working right, like a poorly managed business or a dysfunctional family) we seem to stall, blind to the concept that we might even have issues. Take the Fringe Festival - it's a perfect example of something that needed some kind of change. But the administrators wouldn't deal with the issues, like chastising the successful and flattering below-average shows with a flat $400 salary, whether or not they sold any tickets, until it was too late. As a result, the Seattle Fringe Festival, which for 13 years supported and celebrated creative performance endeavors within several venues on Capitol Hill, imploded.
It's sad to think that the Fringe Festival could have pulled through if they had taken a better look at their issues. I'm still hopeful that they might come back somehow, that if they find the right people to run the business side of things - people who aren't artists perhaps - they can pay back those who lost money in last year's festival and slowly rebuild trust.
I'd like to think of the Fringe Festival as in a phase, dormant for now, but not altogether lost. The baby just needs clean bathwater. It hasn't been tossed out altogether. No, it hasn't. I am in denial of that fact. In my mind, it's in a cocoon, ready to burst forth again somehow somewhere in the future.
So instead, let's make a change to something that works just fine, like the Gay Pride Parade. My question to the Pride Committee is this: Why? Why change something that's thrived for more than two decades? Why change something that doesn't need changing?
I think what needs to be changed about Seattle's Gay Pride Parade on Capitol Hill is a snobby attitude. If the Gay Pride Committee wants to grow, why not grow out of its nucleus on Capitol Hill, rather than abandon the baby, which is now actually a young and very healthy 25-year-old adult? I mean, there is something to say for history and tradition here - both need to be recognized and respected, especially when they work, and particularly when they have brought positive, healthy results.
We've already lost an important cultural and artistic establishment in the Fringe Festival. Let's
not lose another historical Capitol Hill keystone, the Gay Pride pa-
rade.
And now, on a seemingly unrelated subject, here we are, attempting to build an $11 billion monorail ("monofail?") with the rationale that inflation will reduce the overall horrendous dollar effect ...is this the change Seattle needs? If using inflation as a tool isn't an obtusely manipulative line of thinking I don't know what is. Let's just pave our streets in gold now, shall we?
We are losing cultural icons and gaining more and more consequences of the American Dream, namely debt. And since I'm not a budget expert, I'll just use my common sense and say I think it's much more feasible to bring back the Fringe Festival than to build a monorail. Hey, the fringe is only $120,000 in the hole and y'know, with local inflation going the way it is, you can't even buy a house down here for that much.
Freelance writer Bronwyn Doyle lives on Capitol Hill and can be reached at editor@capitolhilltimes.com.
[[In-content Ad]]
