A Fine FestivALL Weekend

Saturday Morning, Mel and I took in the sights and sounds of FestivALL. We particularly enjoyed seeing the No Pants Players, Drew The Dramatic Fool, and the way cool catfish installation on Fife Street. The whole Art Fair atmosphere on Capitol Street was terrific.

The Bloggerazzi were out in full force. You can check out the Gazz photos at the Downtown WV blog and the WV Photo Blog, but there are also cool pics available from Scott Mitchell at his Entropy blog, On Location With Rick Lee, Jackie Lantern's Saved By The Torso, and Dale Morton, the man who made the naked catfish which were decorated by local artists, has more shots of the fish at his cool blog.

Local blogger Oncee and Gazz Editor Doug Imbrogno both have screen grabs from the Taylor Books Gazzcam that show Mel's bright orange hat in the lower left corner. I was standing to her left, just out of camera range. Oncee has been keeping a pretty comprehensive round-up of FestivALL coverage going over at his blog, and has also uploaded his own photos, which you can read about here.

In the afternoon, Mel had a surprise visit from a 60-pound Sulcata Tortoise that lumbered through her yard. It moved pretty fast for a Tortoise. Turns out that it belonged to a neighbor, and had escaped. I didn't think it looked native. This thing was huge! We were afraid that it might get hit by a car, but then we figured that it might do more damage to any car that hit it than the car would to to it I entertained fleeting thoughts of taking it home and using it as a dinosaur for my GI Joes, but sanity prevailed. As of yesterday, the hefty beshelled reptile was back home with its family.

Later that night, it was off to a short film festival in the front yard of Steve and Amee Beckner's house in Elkview. Steve was the main songwriter for Go Van Gogh, one of the most popular bands that I used to play on Radio Free Charleston many years ago, and he's still writing tunes. Along with the cool live-action and animated shorts, we had a sneak preview of the new video version of Radio Free Charleston, which will debut online any day now here at The Gazz.com. Steve has posted a photo of the get-together on his blog, which you can see here. I'm way back at the top of the photo, sitting in front of WVSU Media Professor Steve Gilliland. Steve Beckner will be performing on a future episode of RFC, and next week, the song of the week will be a Go Van Gogh classic from the RFC archives.

Sunday, we had to forego the monsoon-drenched coolness at FestivALL to attend a couple of private events, a birthday party and a memorial service (talk about Yin and Yang), but it was still a fun day. Hopefully, for FestivALL next year the weather will be a bit more cooperative. My only complaint about FestivALL was that there was so much stuff going on that it was hard to take it all in. As far as complaints go, that's not a bad one to have.