|
You are a very cool, very strange beast, Seattle. Not unlike last year, the Tour de Fat here had a strange vibe. The bike parade was sort of messy with cars getting in the mix and people getting angry and whathaveyou, but still, for all that, WFP still had a pretty successful day because many of you are really very nice underneath your thick veneer of chic suave.
How do we know this? Well, people here (and everywhere, actually) continually commented on how wonderful WFP's Nomadic Engagement Device is ("You absolutely have the best set-up here!" they exclaimed), which made a nice day for us, so thank you. In the interest of letting you in on the way things work for us, we'll tell you that we have settled into a good routine where Andrew runs the bike-car race and the literary roulette from one corner of the gypsy cart, and Evan P runs sales and the farm game from the other corner. Periodically throughout the day we offer a dictionary race and the winner gets either a back issue of Matter, or a beer token. We were super happy to have so many Tour de Fatters come up and tell us they have been procuring and enjoying our publications that they get down at Elliott Bay Book Company here in the Emerald City. Wow. Nice.
Anyway, at one point during the show, a woman named Jacqueline Suskin who runs a Poem Store (she brings her typewriter and a chair strapped to her extracycle and sits down and types a poem for someone per their subject and their price) came by and we invited her to set-up alongside us and it was really quite something. She was amazingly talented and we were glad she made an appearance. Look for a special piece from her in the forthcoming Boneshaker BA 42-400.
All in all, the show was a success, even though the cloudiness seemed to cap the energy level up here in the Northwest. Next week we'll greet Portland with a fervor you've never seen. Promise.
Goodness! PS: Did we mention that we traversed Canada en route to Seattle from Minneapolis? What a funny little country that is up there. How cute! How interesting! How capable of doing a very many things right, it seemed to us. Highlights: camping on the coast of Lake Manitoba (save for the bird-sized mosquitoes), the canola fields of Saskatchewan (rows and rows of miles and miles of brilliant yellow), the mountains of British Columbia (now *those* are Rocky Mountains), and the good people of Vancouver. Lowlights: the border crossing back into the U.S., our home nation, that we'd rather not discuss, but probably will if you ask us at the right time.
Your faithful field correspondents,
Andrew and Evan P.
Next stop- Portland!
|
