Music for White Center

Things are popping in White Center this summer. Friday, July 13, the White Center Arts Alliance kicked off the first of the White Center Music Nights. My husband and I spooned up delicious Indian food at Mehra’s Indian Grill to a 20s and 30s jazz tempo performed by Del Rey and Craig Florey. Then we went on to Café Rozella for dessert and rap/hip hop with a conscience by Global Heat. Other participating restaurants were the Salvadorian Bakery, 88 Restaurant, Pho 54 and Taqueria Guaymas. We were disappointed that we didn’t have enough time or enough room in our stomachs to go everywhere. But we can try again in August. Music Nights in White Center will be held the second Friday every month through October.

If you can’t get enough of a music fix at Music Nights, you can go to Café Rozella at 7:00 p.m. any Friday all summer. Last Friday, we listened to Children of the Revolution. It was a very Seattle experience as it was raining. Usually, the bands perform in the plaza in front of the café; last week, they sang and danced flamenco inside the tiny coffee shop. As many people as could fit crowded inside. We huddled under a dripping table umbrella outside and peered in the window. It was still fun, though. Tonight, we’re going to hear Eduardo Mendonca. It doesn’t look like it’s going to rain.

Last Saturday, as a part of Seafair—Seattle’s Summer Celebration, the White Center Jubilee Days Parade was held. I took all of the pictures posted here at the parade. The one at the top is of music of a different kind, the John F. Kennedy High School Lancer Marching Band.

The Seafair Pirates were out in full force, terrorizing children and old ladies and handing out candy. The boom of the cannon from their pirate ship on wheels could be heard for blocks. The pirates have been marching in parades and gracing other Seafair events since 1949.

White Center's parade began many years ago as a decorated-bicycle parade for children. A Little League team carry on the tradition.

A drill team adds flair to the parade.

And what would a parade be without beauty queens? The White Center Jubilee Days Parade had a full quota.

Politicians joined the parade, too. This doggy is for Dow, Dow Constantine that is.

The parade was part of a two-day street fair that included food booths, arts and crafts, children's entertainment on the community stage, a carnival and a Saturday night street dance. Rain was eminent the entire weekend, but in typical Seattle fashion, a good time was still had by all.

Volunteer

I’ve taken part in three plant/land events this last week. The photo is of me wearing my White Center Spring Clean tee-shirt and Trust for Public Land hat.

Friday, May 11, I worked for the Washington Native Plant Society to prepare for the spring native plant sale at the Bellevue Botanical Garden on Saturday, May 12. Tuesday, I attended the 12th Annual Conservation Awards Breakfast sponsored by the Cascade Land Conservancy, and this weekend I volunteered at the 4th Annual White Center Spring Clean, organized by the White Center Community Development Association.

I’m always glad to see the labels at the WNPS sales. The sales, held in the spring and the fall, raise money for Plant Society activities such as native restorations and educational outreach. But the labels, tidily affixed to a pot containing only one native species, provide a much-needed refresher course in plant identification for me, so much easier than trying to pick them out amongst the jumble of nature-gone-wild in the forest. It’s like any other skill, use it or lose it, and since my native plant stewardship training in 2001, I haven’t used it enough to remember all of Washington’s native plants.

Then I had breakfast with the governor (along with 1800 others). Gov. Christine Gregoire said she couldn’t bring all of the Land Conservancy supporters to Olympia, so she brought Olympia to the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle. There she signed the Transfer of Development Rights into law. Frankly, I don’t entirely understand the bill, must do more research. In addition to recognizing those who’ve contributed to the conservation of lands, the breakfast was a fundraiser. According to the thank you I received in the mail the very day after the breakfast (how did they do that?), $653,705 were raised. That should help save a few trees.

At the Saturday White Center Spring Clean Up, I grubbed Himalayan blackberries Rubus discolor at Lakewood Park. If you’re not from the Pacific Northwest, you probably don’t know that this species of blackberry is extremely invasive. The Washington native trailing blackberry Rubus ursinus looks quite a bit like the Himalayan variety. Ideally, you eradicate the invasive while leaving the native in place.

A large contingent of Seattle Pacific University students volunteered for the Clean Up. Working with them was a delight. One young woman I talked with was born in the Ukraine. Her family moved to the U.S. when she was only eight months old, but they continued to speak Ukrainian in her home, so she’s bilingual. This summer she’s going back for the first time. She’ll be working in an orphanage.

A group of young men made the time-consuming, hard physical labor of digging up blackberry roots pass more quickly by inventing stories. One student would start a fantasy, and the next one would pick it up and elaborate. Since I’m a writer (you can read about my work at www.linda-wallace.com), I was thrilled at their choice of entertainment. The stories were pretty good, too.

When the Spring Clean was over, I returned home tired, with scratched wrists (must remember to wear my gauntlet gloves next time) but content. Volunteering. It makes me happy.

Street Festival

The Cambodians threw a party yesterday, the 5th Annual White Center Cambodian New Year Street Festival. I’m not Cambodian, but I felt welcome.

It was a small event for a street festival--only one block--but the fairgoers more than made up with enthusiasm for any lack in size. I only spent a few hours there late in the afternoon, but the party was an all-day affair from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and included music, dance, contests and food.

I made it to the festival in time to see the banana-eating contest, just the very end of the male round but early enough to cheer for all of the female contestants. The audience was whooping it up when I arrived; they clearly thought this was hilarious entertainment.

The stage was backed by a large painting of Ankgor Wat in shades of purple, pink and orange with a banner of blue and red stripes behind the painting. Together, the two made a creative facsimile of the Cambodian flag, the only flag that incorporates a building in its design. I got that bit of information from the Cambodian Cultural Museum and Killing Fields Memorial site. I vaguely knew there was a Cambodian museum in White Center, but I’ve never been there even though I’ve lived in this community for 17 years. Shame on me. I will definitely visit the museum and memorial soon.

Next came three rounds of hacky sack competition to see who could keep the footbag in the air with the greatest number of consecutive kicks. Then the winners of each round competed against each other. That worked great for one little boy who survived the elimination round with only 5 kicks because everyone in his group was a dud. I sort of lost track, but I think the grand champion, who received an elaborate trophy, won with around 50 kicks, a combined score from the elimination and final rounds.

The MC for both events, banana eating and hacky sack, was great. He explained rules and kept up a running commentary in both the Cambodian language, Khmer, and English. When he was counting the hacky sack kicks, though, he mostly used the Cambodian language. I ought to know how to count in Khmer by now, but I can’t remember beyond "one," phonetically something like "moo-uhy."

The entertainment for the last hour or so I spent at the festival was music. The MC pushed a very large pink pig--for 2007, the year of the pig--out onto the pavement to preside over the dance floor. A lovely dancer invited my husband and me to join in, but we declined, not having the flexible wrists and fingers required for the elaborate hand movements. A couple of different bands and several singers performed--all very interesting but way too loud for my middle-aged ears.

To put some distance between me and the musicians, I checked out the vendors and decided to sample papaya salad, something I’ve wanted to try ever since I saw "The Scent of Green Papaya." It was delicious: long shreds of green papaya mixed with tomatoes, peanuts and a hot and spicy dressing; however, there was a mystery ingredient--crab leg shells. No crab that I could detect, just bits of shell and one small leg with no crab in it. I don’t know if the shell was there to provide flavor for the dressing similar to the way you can boil shrimp shells to enrich seafood stock or if I was just unlucky to get only shell and no crab. In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed the salad in spite of having to pick through it carefully to avoid crunching down on rock-hard shell fragments.

It was really a great festival. I had more fun than I have at lots of larger, more elaborate street fairs. I’m already looking forward to the 6th Annual White Center Cambodian New Year Street Festival. Maybe it will be 2 blocks long next year.

White Center

Yesterday, I played tour guide for my community. When I invited a friend from the Eastside to dinner, she confessed to being afraid to drive through White Center. She envisioned tattooed gangsters with guns standing on every street corner. She agreed to come but only if she could bring another one of our friends along for support.

I’ve been attending White Center Community Development Association meetings for several months, so I had a fair amount of knowledge about the many current and scheduled improvements I could share with my guests. I chauffeured them around the business district, pointing out the international flavor of stores like the Heng Heng Market and restaurants such as the Salvadorean Bakery, Thai Thai, Pho’ and the Moon Indian Grill. There are many more, but those are some of my personal favorites. We visited the schools, including our two newly built, beautiful elementary buildings, White Center Heights and Mount View, and our libraries and parks.

I took particular pride in showing my friends the parks where I’ve worked as a steward planting and maintaining native plants. One of "my" parks, White Center Heights, is scheduled for a $550,000 renovation by the Starbucks Neighborhood Parks Program. The makeover is scheduled in June to take place over seven days using volunteer labor. Guess who’s going to be one of those volunteers?

My guests were suitably impressed with the neighborhood and enthused most satisfactorily at each site. The friend who’s a real estate agent was especially interested in Greenbridge, a mixed-income development of one hundred acres that potentially will house 3,500 people in 1,000 homes. The photo is from the King County Housing Authority Web site. I appreciated my guests’ interest, but what was most rewarding was by the end of the evening my friend decided she could visit me in the future with having someone along to ride shotgun.

Disc Golf

I’m miffed. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer didn’t include White Center's Lakewood Park in a list of parks that have disc golf courses. Blythe Lawrence wrote a nice piece on disc golf at Cornwall Park in Bellingham in the September 21 issue of the Intelligencer’s "1 Tank/1 Trip" feature in the Thursday "Getaways" section. Well, I think it’s a nice piece. She describes the game and her attempts to master it, but since I don’t play myself, I have no idea how accurate the information is. However, I felt like I could play after I read her article. And she does a good job of capturing the enthusiasm that is causing the sport to gain in popularity. You can even play the game online at http://disc-golf.freeonlinegames.com/ The cartoon is from that site.

I love having a disc golf course in our local park. I’ve helped establish native plants at Lakewood, enjoyed picnics there, fed the geese bread at Hicks Lake (a definite no, no) and taken my grandchildren for bike rides on the paved paths, but for a long time I didn’t know the park also served another function. I’d never heard of disc golf before I discovered we have a course right here in White Center. I’d wondered about the purpose of the numerous metal poles encircled with wire baskets and festooned with chains. Bird sanctuary? Weather-reporting apparatus? Trash can? What? Oh, disc golf. How cool!

Not everyone shares my delight in the course. Dick Thurnau, the man I wrote about in my "Benches for Bumbershoot" blog, is conducting an on-going war with the golfers. He’s convinced they’re the culprits who leave behind piles of alcoholic beverage containers in and around the trash cans (strictly illegal) and damage the trees and native shrubs we’ve planted. He has a spiral notebook full of photos he’s taken of beer cans, wine bottles, broken tree limbs, stripped tree bark, concrete tee pads in spots he considers inappropriate and other violations. He’s a voluminous letter writer to political and park officials and often mentions the disc golfers as a problem. So, that makes the two of us have a problem because I want to support the golf course.

I see his point about the plants. In the P-I article, even though she enthuses about disc golfing as a whole, Ms. Lawrence also notes, "The scars of scores of discs were visible on tree trunks throughout Cornwall Park." I don’t know how to solve that problem, but I suspect not all of the damage documented by Dick in his photos was perpetrated by golfers.

I know Dick and I share the common goal of improving Lakewood Park even if we don’t always agree on how to do it. We’re both members of Friends of Hicks Lake, an organization formed for the purpose of improving the water quality of Lakewood Park’s small pond. Dick is by far the most active, and definitely the most vocal, member. I’m wondering if I can continue to belong to a group that, thanks to Dick’s letters, is probably seen as opposing disc golf at Lakewood Park, a view exactly opposite of my own. Sigh. How can anything ever get accomplished when even people of good will can’t agree on what should be done?