Google Street View

I just noticed Google has finally put up Street View for the Seattle area on Google Maps. Seattle lovers should check it out. There are navigable street views of most every street between north Everett and South Tacoma and between Bremerton and Carnation. They've also done most of inhabited Australia, Tokyo, and Paris. I was beginning to think they were slighting Seattle, but it looks now like they were just trying to be thorough.

A random screen shot of one of the 10s of thousands of street images now available:

Greg Nickels Is A Fool

The events of the eviction of Nickelsville from alleged city land yesterday felt a little like a Beethoven sonata to me: attack, release, attack, release. Except with a background drone. My description of it for YouTube users is intended to get the idea across to non-Seattleites:

Sept. 26, 2008. Nickelsville, a tent city with ambitions to become a shantytown for the homeless in Seattle. After three and a half days of existence, Greg Nickels, our mayor who hates the homeless, whom Nickelsville is named for, as a dishonor, orders Seattle police to evict the occupants and demolish the camp. The police don't want to do it. They tell the people privately that they know that the mayor is a liar and that there is not enough shelter to house them. They will have no choice but to find yet another place to camp. But orders are orders. In every scene the sound of news and police helicopters overhead nearly drowns out the human voices, but hopefully the sense of the hour is conveyed.

Eviction at Nickelsville

Noise at City Hall

Women in Black usually do silent vigils when homeless people die outside or by violence. Today they made noise by banging pots and pans around City Hall, with help from WHEEL and the Church of Mary Magdalene and others. I was there, living out my dream of some day participating in a Chinese funeral procession.

The purpose of the rally was to speak out about the extreme need for the planned Summer Emergency Shelter for Women. With only $9,500 of city funding it could be open by the beginning of next week.

After marching around City Hall 4 or 5 times with the sun beating straight down, all collected in front of the building, and I got the camera out.

Noise at City Hall

Peeve: "Poor Have Too Much"

When I talk to middle-class people, sometimes I hear complaints like, "It isn't fair that poor unemployed people don't pay income taxes." Or, "Gee, it must be sweet to never have to pay a mortgage, rent, or house payments. I wish I had it so easy."

They really get worked up when they find out that some poor and homeless individuals have had good fortune. When a homeless guy wins the lottery, I have heard housed people bitch, "It isn't right, that they win big while I have to work for a living," even as they're putting a dollar of their own down for a shot at the same good luck.

It would totally suck that poor people have the occasional good fortune if their lives were a bed of clover aside from it.

A case of misplaced poverty envy occurs every year when the Seattle Seafair Torchlight Parade goes past Anitra's room, and we open the blinds and watch it from the comfort of bed. The other parade observers outside on the street often make comments to the effect that we have it too good. Ha! One evening a year, maybe!

So many poor people live in Pioneer Square because decades ago Seattle made the decision to sweep all of its poor into this neighborhood and forget about them. That it was discovered to have historic charm and turned upscale around me is not my fault. That they route the parade past our bed is not our fault.

Once the parade started people turned and watched the parade instead of us, and I took some videos.

This first video is ironic, in that the sirens heard at the beginning are just a reminder of the sirens we hear every 20 minutes on average all year round, 24-7. So we're supposed to regard all those sirens at once as a treat?

Hot Cycles



Anitra says a bad word. I respond by bad-mouthing clowns and poking fun at the lederhosen-ed. Before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, I clown in print and I'm part German myself. So ease up.

Color Commentary



The ability to live in a neighborhood where dragons may often be sighted is also a benefit of living in the Iron Triangle.

Torchlight Dragon

Wenches Are Good

The light is poor in some of this, but I think it still has interest as a documentation of 1) The Seafair Pirates admit wenches now (hooray!), and 2) I almost get shot in the face.

Seafair Wenches

Dragon Team

There's nothing like a Chinese Dragon. I've wanted to film a Chinese dragon team for ages. I love the pass-off, when the half of the team animating the dragon is replaced by the half that has been resting. The dragon itself never tires. I managed to get two pass-offs on this video, filmed last evening during the Chinatown Seafair Parade.

Homeless in Seattle & Noa Noa

Last night I slept again in a tent on City Hall Plaza in protest of the inhumane sweeps of homeless encampments on public land. The lives of homeless people are endangered by the destruction of their survival gear, done in the name of "public safety" and "hygiene." This morning that protest was followed by a civil disobedience. Fifteen of the protestors obstructed a downtown street in Seattle, a street that just happens to lie precisely between the offices of the mayor and the county executive.

First, there was a memorial service conducted by Women In Black of Seattle. They read the names of 283 people who died on the streets in King County from 2000 to date.

Homeless remembrance Service, Seattle



In the Polynesian traditions a law (taboo) can be broken only if rituals are carefully followed. It's called Noa Noa in some places. Sometimes translated as Freeing, or Release, or, Declaration of Freeing. The rituals demand a statement of purpose, and the invocation of the god governing the taboo, petitioning for release from it. That's exactly what you see in the next video, plus initial arrests.

Stand Against the Sweeps



The rest of the arrests, including a scene in which Anitra, my woman, appearing in the role of a hooded gang banger, is processed for arrest outside of an SPD bus, while I explain to someone that her being arrested and me filming is all part of the plan. "Division of labor" as I call it. Her arrest was well planned by the Real Change Organizing Project, and was joined by participants from SHARE/WHEEL, Women in Black, and members of the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness, and others.

The Usual Suspects

Nalini at Folklife

I just discovered that I accidentally deleted all the videos I made of the Flamenco performances at Folklife Sunday. Rats. Well, there's always next year.

The good news: I still have 24 minutes of Bhangra and Bollywood dance to upload. Here's Nalini again, on the International Dance Stage, Folklife, May 25, 2008.

Nalini at Folklife

Bhangra in Seattle

Yesterday I got to see Bhangra live for the first time, courtesy of Rhythms of India and others performing at the Northwest Folklife Festival here in Seattle. I have to say, I really enjoy the challenge of filming this sort of thing. Trying to decide where to point the camera and how much to take in at every moment is a weird, geeky, rush. My favorite moments in this occur when the dancers at one side of the stage cross over to the dancers at the other side and I succeed in following one set through the cross-over. That is so cool.

Rhythms of India

Century 21

Video Find of the Day

The Seattle World's Fair exactly as I remember it, minus the pay foot massage machines. And where's the Bubbleator?

Century 21 Calling - Bell Labs promo film

Sign of the Times

One of our vendors brought this in to the Real Change office this morning like it was a picture of his new baby. He showed it off proudly to everyone who would look. "Have you seen my eviction notice?"

"Shelter #6" refers to a covered picnic shelter at Woodland Park, near the zoo, not a homeless shelter. His property isn't actually in the shelter, it's hidden nearby. The notice says he has to move it or lose it by tomorrow afternoon.

As he put it, he's been evicted from the street to the street.

Note that contrary to the warm fuzzy goodness of the words "Customer Service Bureau" neither the notice nor anyone on the other end of that line promises or can promise any place for the evictee to go. (Really, we're customers now? We're not citizens anymore? Or is the idea that homeless people aren't citizens?) The homeless shelters in this city are full, as was underlined by the news that the count conducted Thursday night found 15% more homeless than last year.

Playground-Citizen Wesley

Soon after we moved in to the garage in Seattle my Father came back from a day at Fort Lewis to tell us his orders. He would be sent overseas, to Taiwan, AKA Formosa, Nationalist China, The Republic of China. He would administer some Army program there. He wouldn't say what the program would involve, except to say he didn't expect war to break out at any time, and that probably he would only be gone for 6 to 8 months.

That seemed like a long time to me and the thought of not seeing him for so long stirred anxiety in me without my knowing why. It wasn't until I was in my 40s that I realized that as ineffective as my Father had been at protecting me from my Mother, I persisted in feeling that he was a protector, simply because he was my Father. It was an irrational hope that, once believed, rationally might be lost.

The anxiety amplified my native caution. I became fearful of anything uncertain. I was already religiously skeptical. Now I began to question everything. I questioned gravity, 2 + 2 = 4, the dark of night, and every single word my teacher said.

A milepost in technology occurred. Sputnik was launched into orbit on Oct 4, 1957. We watched what we all were told at the time was the flashing satellite orbiting over Seattle that evening. Recently I read that it was actually the final booster stage. The papers carrying the news dredged up a 1920 New York Times editorial that scoffed at Robert Goddard's dream of sending rockets into space, saying Goddard ""does not know of the relation of action to reaction, and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react." The newspapers had fun with this new and most dramatic proof that the editors of the New York Times had been full of it. The lesson I took from it was, everything has to be tested and proved. Nothing can be taken for granted.

My Father thought my Mother and I would remain in Seattle the whole time he was in Taiwan. But a week or two before he left for the Far East in mid-October he learned that the Army would send us a month later on a slow boat to [Nationalist] China.

I was taken to Fort Lewis and given half a dozen vaccinations for diseases I never heard of.

I don't recall any more than the low level sexual abuse that month, just fondling every few days. Maybe my Mother was too preoccupied with thoughts of the overseas adventure ahead.

While we waited for our turn to cross the ocean, Halloween happened, and I had a Seattle-style trauma.

Seattle was much less uptight in 1957 than it is today, fifty years later. But there were signs of things to come. One of the signs was a city-wide ban on children's masks at Halloween. It had been decided that masks with eye-holes obstructed vision too much. Children could be hit with cars.

OK, so I would not wear my cool Zorro costume on the sidewalks. I would only wear it on the school grounds, WHERE THERE ARE NO CARS, during the MANDATORY (for the sake of our "HEALTHY SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT") school Halloween march.

Well, guess what the teachers said? The LAW is the LAW. No masks. But it's a Zorro costume, there has to be a mask. "No problem, the march isn't for a couple of hours, WE'LL MAKE YOU A COMPLETELY NEW COSTUME THAT WILL BE LEGAL AND YOU'LL LOVE IT."

They made me a slapped-together paper and cloth clown costume. They wouldn't stop at that, they made me submit to grease-paint. "You'll see, it will be great!"

It was horrible. I was transformed against my will into a stupid clown. The other kids made cruel jokes about it throughout. At home it took two hours to wash the grease-paint off. Wherever it had been my skin was red and sore for days. Turned out I was allergic to grease-paint. All to avoid getting hit by non-existent cars. Thank you uptight, we-know-best-what's-good-for-you-Seattle!

And then, a couple of weeks later, my Mother and I were riding a train to San Francisco where we would catch a Merchant Marine ship to the Orient.

Before we left I got a report card with no grades. It was called a "progress report". I was in a fucking grade-free experimental "progressive" program, it so happened. Since I'd only attended 9 weeks of school the only content of the report was the following paragraph:

"Wesley is a conscientious student, does his best at all times. He is a shy child, but is much more willing to participate in games, etc., than he was the first of the year. He reads with the high group, with good understanding of subject matter. His written work is neatly done. Wesley is a fine citizen on the playground, well liked by his classmates. We will all miss him."

Isn't it wonderful that just then, in those two months of 3rd grade I happened to start getting over my shyness?

Every damn school I went to I was "shy" when I got there, and I "started to get over it" after two or three months of brilliant teaching designed to foster good healthy extroversion.

Total crock.

A Kind of Certainty

One thing that my Mother did during the trip across country in 1957 that went a long way toward making up for all the abuse -- in my mind at the time -- was to help me through arithmetic workbooks and drills. That probably sounds like more abuse to most people but to me math was a place. It was as interesting a place as Wyoming or Montana. More, actually. I was still at the point where I wasn't clear on how to set my own problems and goals. So my Mother's help was welcome.

We were delayed by car troubles. We spent a week at a motel in an Idaho town waiting for an auto part to be shipped to the shop the car was in. Two results: We arrived in Seattle later than planned, close to the start of school. From then on Dad only bought new cars.

We came directly to my Grandparent's brick house on Beacon Hill. Almost at the crest of the hill, it was two houses down from the old wooden house that my Father grew up in. The brick house was built around '42, after my Father had left home. A lot of the work was done by my Grandfather, especially the wiring and plumbing. The house had a basement that was used only for storage and washing and drying clothes. It had a work table with cabinets above. But the table was covered with rusting cans and jars of rank chemicals like pesticides and turpentine and slug bait. It was like our own toxic waste-dump. It probably shortened my life by a decade. Whenever I die, add ten years. That will be how long I would have lived.

Aside from the basement there was just one floor upstairs. A large bedroom and a small one, a bathroom, living room, kitchen and very tight dining alcove.

My Grandfather was gone. Grandmother Gertrude was too set in her ways to be comfortable with the changes it would take for us to move in with her.

So we moved into the garage instead.

[Below: The house hasn't been torn down yet! It's the smaller brick house on our left. The old garage is gone but there's a new structure sitting exactly where it was. We're looking west toward Beacon Avenue, which had a dirt median then, and was lined with telephone poles. Today the median is landscaped and the avenue is lined with trees. And telephone poles.]

The garage had already been converted into a small one bedroom apartment. It was a two car garage. The two stalls were made into separate rooms, with a door between. The sliding car-doors were permanently shut and sealed.

We used one room as a living room during the day, a kitchen, and my bedroom at night (I slept on a couch.) The other room would be my parents' bedroom. A tiny bathroom had been added to that. It was so small the shower was over the toilet and drenched it. To put it another way, the bathroom was a shower with a toilet and sink in it.

The kitchen stove was a kerosene stove that could also burn wood. It was the only heater also. Since the kerosene was gravity fed from a barrel outside, and it was a pain to replace or refill the barrel, we used wood whenever possible. Fortunately the back yard beyond the garage was thickly wooded with plum, pear, apricot, and apple trees, so we could cut our own wood.

"We" meaning me. I was the one outside all the time chopping the wood into logs and kindling. I didn't mind. To me, it was cool. I loved that on cold nights we had to stoke the fire at 2 in the morning if we wanted to not freeze.

We had a sense of security because of that that I don't have today. I remember a horrible winter storm we had in the early 90s that left my neighborhood in the U District without power for more than 8 hours. All the heat I had during that blackout came from a dozen plumber's candles. There was no way I could safely build a fire. Had the blackout gone on another 3 or 4 hours the candles would have been gone and I would have had to seek public shelter.

At the garage we could have lived through a blackout like that for an entire winter. It was great knowing that.

A lot of people are attracted to living outside of conventional housing because they can no longer bear depending on the grid for daily survival. They can't stand the thought that a fried squirrel and a computer malfunction could leave them without heat for days.

So they look for escape in extreme self-reliance. They live in tents or shanties in places they hope no one will bother them and try to take care of their own needs by primitive but robust means.

The rest of the community doesn't understand. They think these people must all be criminals, why else would they hide in the woods?

They aren't any more criminals than the rest of us. They're just people who need a different kind of certainty than others do.

Cowardice Rules

Regarding the last post:

Ironically, just yesterday afternoon Anitra, who owes me big time, gifted me with a joint membership in the Madison Market Co-op. So I have a place to buy yeast at a monthly discount. All I have to do is plan ahead, so as not to run out of anything before dark.

I'd sue SaveWay if I could prove they were encouraging vigilantism with favors. But I doubt I could prove that on my own. I need other people who have had something like this happen to them to tell about it, to me or to Real Change.

We live in a police state. When oppression is routine, some cowardly people who don't want to be on the oppressed side are always going to be ready to join the oppressors. When the police rule, everyone is going to want to be the police, including the very street thugs that the citizenry has feared so much as to have let the police state happen in the first place.

What happened to me last night is just exactly what you'd expect to happen in a city that willingly allows downtown businesses to operate their own corp of bicycle cops unaccountable to citizens.

Seattle is a city, by and large, of cowards. Cowards who are afraid of even the sight of poor people in their midst. I've seen middle class Seattleites cross the street wide-eyed with fear, to avoid passing people on the sidewalks who look homeless. The city is now engaged in a war on the visible homeless, taking the war even to the places where they try to hide out of sight. It's appropriate that Greg Nickels is our Mayor. You want a coward to be a mayor of cowards.

Another irony is that over the last ten years that I've shopped at SaveWay I've caught them many times giving me the wrong change, and half those times were in my favor. The money I returned to them, because I didn't want what wasn't owed me, if totaled up, could have bought a couple of cases of honey jars.

I don't want what isn't owed me. I just want the America I was promised.

Land of the Free my ass. More like Land of the Cowards.

Road Trip III

After stopping to gawk at the Grand Canyon, we finished the last leg of Route 66. Then there was a detour south to Tijuana, where my parents spent most of a day looking for souvenirs. One of the souvenirs they got was this tourist shot of me posing on a burro painted to look like a zebra. We also got one of my Father on the burro wearing one of the other hats, but I've lost that one. My Mother was in a foul mood most of the time we were in Tijuana, complaining about how dirty it was, and how all the souvenirs were junk, but she cheered up during the taking of these pictures, because we looked so silly.

The planned ride up the coast was skipped in favor of a faster inland route. We were getting behind schedule. So I had to see the coastal highway another time. The highways we took eventually brought us to the Eastside and we approached Seattle by way of the Lake Washington Floating Bridge.

I'd been to Seattle before, over two years earlier, but I couldn't make much of it, because all I had to compare it with was my little neighborhood in Schofield Barracks, and the comparison was too distant to put anything in perspective.

But this time, I'd been across the country, passing through 15 states and hundreds of cities and towns, all fresh in my mind. There were a couple of things about Seattle now that stood out and struck me as pretty special.

For one, it is way cool that a nearly 4000 mile journey can end with a drive on a road on a lake that takes you into a tunnel which then spills you out into the guts of the city, to see the downtown skyline suddenly, as you emerge. That's a hell of a cool entrance.

For the other: At that time in history Seattle didn't look like any of the other cities and towns I'd recently been in. I couldn't place the difference at first. There was something about the overall impression that was unique, but it took a day or two to figure it out.

The houses were unalike! Every other town and city I'd been through had a more or less uniform look to it, at least neighborhood by neighborhood. There'd be block after block of nearly identical houses with nearly identical color schemes and architecture. In places in Seattle you might have four or five similar houses in a row, but there'd never be that degree of sameness throughout a neighborhood.

When I realized that was the difference I felt a great sense of relief. At least architecturally, Seattle was an escape from the culture of conformity that was the United States in the 1950s.

It was another couple of years before I noticed it, but Seattle was also pretty special in its sense of humor. Back then, before Century 21 and the '62 World's Fair, Seattleites didn't think of the idea of Seattle being "New York By and By" as a goal to grow by. It was just an in-joke. Nobody took the aspirations to greatness seriously. Or almost nobody.

The sense of humor even extended to its oppression. Today motorcycle cops in Seattle run you off the road and pin you to a wall before giving you a jaywalking ticket. In the 50s they enforced the jaywalking law with the same 50s sense of humor that got us Seafair Pirates.

One day when my parents had taken me downtown to do some shopping, it was either '55 or '58, we were standing at the southeast corner of 3rd & Pine waiting for the light to change, when a man next to us stepped off the curb prematurely. There was immediately a booming voice saying, "You in the blue and green flannel shirt! Yes, you! Step back on the curb, please! Don't make me send my buddies over to talk with you!" My Father pointed up in front of us. It was a policeman with a bullhorn cheerfully directing us pedestrians from a vantage point above the awning of the Bon Marché. All you had to do was listen to the happy policeman, and you didn't get a ticket. There was none of the gotcha games that the city is into now. They were after compliance, not collecting fines.

Another example of the great old-time spirit of Seattle turned up when I was finding this image of the Bon (4th & Pine corner) over at Wikipedia. The Wikipedia article tells how Josephine Brennan, cofounder of the Bon with her husband Edward Nordhoff, learned Chinook to better serve her Native American customers.

It was definitely in '55 when my Father drove us downtown for the first time in my memory. When going downtown we always followed the same route that the bus from Beacon Hill took in those days, north into the city on 4th Avenue. So we passed under the 4th & Yesler overpass and drove by the City Hall Park. The Park was then just like it is now except the trees were smaller. There were the same number of poor people lying on the grass. My Father pointed to them with pride. He said that in other cities, they wouldn't let their poor people lie down like that, but Seattleites were proud of the fact that they didn't punish people for being poor.

Whenever we passed poor people downtown, Dad would say, there goes some local color. "That's what makes Seattle great," he'd say, "anyone can be at home here." He wasn't the only one who had that attitude. Many strangers that I met on buses and in diners over the next ten years expressed the same feelings.

Of course, in the 50s, a lot of Seattleites were proud that, while Olympia was the official capital of the state, Seattle was the real de facto capital of the Soviet of Washington.

[Left: James Farley, Postmaster General for FDR, who is credited with coining the phrase, "There are forty-seven states in the Union, and the soviet of Washington." The same year, 1936, he also came up with the gem, "As Maine goes, so goes Vermont."]

Man Man

Video Find of the Day

Wikipedia says, "Man Man is a playfully existential United States Viking-vaudeville punk-wop rock-and-soul collective from Philadelphia." I don't know what Viking-vaudeville means. How would that compare to Mongol-hordes-vaudeville? Or Visigoth-vaudeville? Maybe it's best I don't know. This video was recorded in Seattle of all places.

Jean Godden Goes to the Environment

Yesterday I got a piece of pretty glossy campaign literature in the mail. It was from Jean Godden, excellent incumbent Seattle City Councilmember, running for her own seat again. If you live in Seattle you may have gotten it, too.


What Seattleites may not realize is that before Jean Godden could become a friend to the Environment, she had to meet it and get to know it. I mean, we all hear about how great the Environment is, but people tell us George Bush is hot stuff, and I don't think that's true.

One day Jean Godden was standing around at Occidental Park, when a voice in her head said, "Lookit all the trees around here. Pretty!" She asked a cameraman if the trees were the Environment. The camerman didn't know. He was from the P-I or something. He said, "You should ask somebody who knows, like Al Gore, maybe."

Jean Godden thought that was a great idea, but she didn't have Al Gore's cell phone number. So instead she went to North Seattle where all the smart local people live (some of them even went to Roosevelt!) and she asked a local. He pointed her east.

Going east from Crown Hill isn't easy! Fortunately there was this boat thingy on the shore of the big lake that was in the way so she didn't have to turn back.


When she got to the other side of the big lake she met a big scary Indian man. She saved herself by staying very very still. She thought, "They go for the motion. I will be as one with the weeds, and the danger will surely pass." And it did!


Finally Jean found the Environment, in a far off land the natives call Sno-kwal-mee Nash-un-nal For-est. Now the voice in her head was telling her, "Get me out of here!" But she ignored the silly voice in her head just this one time, and told her cameraman to set up his tripod. "We're going to make campaign literature right here!"


And that's how that glossy mailer came to be!

Staffing Support Services: Lifestyle Choice?

Yesterday's meeting of the Single Adults Subcommittee of the CEHKC was interesting. There was a long discussion of the use of carrels for interim and long-term housing, meaning partitioned off living spaces. So, more privacy than side-by-side mats on the floor or beds next to one another, but less than walls and locks would provide.

Bill Hobson, the director of DESC, said that a part of the permanent housing at 1811 Eastlake consists of carrels, and required approval from the Seattle Department of Planning and Development (DPD) in 2000. Three thoughts.

1) I didn't know about the carrels. I thought all the units were studios. Huh.

2) I thought that it would have been the Department of Design, Construction and Land Use (DCLU) that had to approve. After the meeting I looked up the DPD on the internet and found out it's the new name of the DCLU. Who told them they could change their name any time they felt like it without notifying the rest of us? What, keeping me informed isn't a high priority? When did I lose my citizenship? Who is it that's so important that they're spending all their time informing them and don't have time left over to tell peons like me? Oh, sure, they can tell Bill Hobson.

3) Why did the DPD/DCLU sign off on the carrels as permanent housing, when homeless people have been trying to get deals like this for decades and always been turned down? I will try to learn the answer to this question sometime in the near future.

In another vein, someone raised the concern that as more and more low-income housing is lost in Seattle, we may find ourselves without housing for the staff members of our housing projects.

So, the fear would be, we'll solve homelessness in the sense of putting the existing homeless all into housing by the time the ten years are up, but then all the staff needed to supply the services at that housing won't be able to find housing.

So we'll have to start a Ten Year Plan To House The Staff Required To Make the Ten Year Plan To End Homelessness Work.

King County will get CEHSSSHPKC: the Committee to End the Homelessness of Supportive Services Staff of Homeless Housing Projects of King County.

Since I was once a janitor for a homeless shelter, I might be asked to serve on a population subcommittee of the CEHSSSHPKC. I could serve on the SASWHABHTS: the Single Adults Staff Who Have Also Been Homeless Themselves Subcommittee.

Of course, Mike Lowry and Ron Sims will know more about my needs than I will, so they will have the all-important votes on the Governing Board of the CEHSSSHPKC. But I will get a stipend, so everything will even out.

Alternatively, it was suggested we could hire more (or mostly) homeless staff, so no one new would be made homeless. Of course then they'd have to change the name from the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness, to the Ten Year Plan to Implement SHARE/WHEEL's Mission.

Te Fare O Tamatoa

Several videos of Te Fare O Tamatoa performing at Folklife Festival, Seattle, 5/28/07. This first one explains what Te Fare O Tamatoa is.



The second one proves the first wasn't good by accident.



No Polynesian dance show is complete without the little ones. Here's a couple tamari'i dancing.



Two more dances by the little ones.

More Polynesian Dance

Tahitian dance by young man with group called Ke Liko A'e O Lei Lehua. This time I remembered the name of the group, with the help of Anitra. Seattle Folklife Festival, May 27, 2007. Hopefully the next day's videos won't be so washed out.



Same group. This time it's a young woman.