Al Parisi
A love of festivals and a knack for calzones brought the Fremont Fair its longtime leader

Originally published Saturday, February 19, 2000

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Valerie and Al Parisi figured out quite some time ago that in the Seattle festival food-booth business, you succeed by being competitive.

"And you make your marriage work by working in separate booths!" said the Greek girl from the Chicago suburbs, who runs their Athena's Gyros booth at everything from the Fremont Fair to Bumbershoot.

Brooklyn-born Al, who parlayed Momma Parisi's calzone recipe into a thriving Parisi Brothers Calzone food booth operation, now produces the very successful Fremont Fair.

And from the window of his funky second-floor office overlooking a huge construction hole just northwest of the Fremont Bridge, Al ponders where he'll hang his hat when his building bites the dust in Fremont's awkward building and development renaissance.

But as the man in charge of the Fremont Fair, which draws more than 350 exhibitors and food booths that, in turn, draw more than 100,000 spectators, Al doesn't have time to worry about calzones or gyros.

"The secret to what we do, if we do it well, is being invisible to the public. Everything goes off on schedule, from the parade and through the whole weekend, and there are no 'emergencies' they can notice. Everybody's happy."

And so when it rains in June -- surprise, Seattle -- no one leaves his or her seat in the beer gardens, and the music from the half-dozen venues continues to throb out over the ship canal. "There was only one stage when I started," said the 44-year-old guy with the occasional gray stray in his flowing dark hair.

Al and Valerie love Fremont. "When we rented on Linden Avenue, Al used to organize block parties where they'd block the street off and everyone would barbecue and dance," Valerie said. That was back when everyone pretty much knew everyone, before Fremont was discovered and reinvented.

Al and Valerie and their two children, Nicholas and Angela, couldn't afford to buy a house in Fremont, and ended up in Ballard. But Al remains rooted in Fremont as executive producer of the Fremont Fair, which is what drew him there in the first place.

When he was in his early 20s, wanderlust lured him west from Long Island and he visited a friend who happened to be a patient in the burn unit at Harborview Medical Center. "Then I picked apples in Eastern Washington, and came back on this side and was a waiter on the Seattle hotel circuit. One of the things that I really liked about Seattle was the festivals," he said.

But what Seattle didn't have in the late 1980s was calzone, like everyone back East could enjoy at the ethnic street festivals for various saints' days and holidays. "I was really into the festivals and I got the idea about calzones. No one in Seattle had calzones."

The Folklife Festival people didn't know from calzones when Al and his brother, Nick, and some friends pitched them on the deep-fried stuffed-pizzas. The Parisi Brothers Calzones shtick was thrown together by six Fremont folks, including Valerie, then a neighbor who "could see they needed help. I became one of the Parisi 'brothers!' "she said.

Valerie and Al started dating. They were married 10 years ago, and their family and food booth business expanded to include Angela, now 8, and the Athena's Gyros and Toucan Do It tropical juice slushies and Mondo Pizza.

When they're both working a fair, Valerie prefers to be a Greek goddess in her Athena's Gyros booth (her family's sauce recipe) while Al works the calzones. On a good festival day, that booth churns out more than 1,000 from-scratch calzones.

"It's quite a grind," Al said. "One year, I actually got out of our booth and walked around. And now I advise all the booth opera

tors to go to a festival they're not working and see it from the other side. They're really fun!" He also manages a once-a-year pilgrimage to the New Orleans Jazz /Heritage Festival ("I love it! But I like all kinds of music," he said.)

"At one point, we were doing 25, 30 food festivals a year, and I even took one on the road with the Lollapalooza jazz festival, to New York and back," Al said, rolling his eyes about that three-month effort. And then came the opportunity to apply for the Fremont Fair executive producer job.

"I had the fair experience and good relationships with various fair promotion people, so I applied."

It was like pitching calzones. He got the job and has been steering the Fremont Fair for the past 10 years, as the free event has grown bigger. And the kick-off parade (the 29th annual starts Saturday, June 17) now starts back on Leary Way Northwest and extends into and through the new Adobe Software Systems complex east of the bridge.

The Fremont Fair is a creature of the Fremont Public Association, and pumps all its profits -- last year, about $50,000 -- into that group's various community functions, including the local food bank. That's part of what gives the neighbors a sense of community in their changing neighborhood.

About 90 percent of the fair's food booths are perennial, including some that have been there from the beginning, such as Cafe Loc and Ziegler's Bratwurst, Al noted.

Valerie and Al still own and run their various food booths, from the University District Street Fair all the way to Bumbershoot, but they're down to "about a dozen festivals now," she said. And of course, they never work the same booth together.

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I. He can be reached at 206-448-8317 or e-mail him at jonhahn@seattle-pi.com