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Trying to figure out what Seafair is all about
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By SUSAN PAYNTER
FARZIN BEYZAVI IS a guest most hosts would invite to a party: good-looking, 21, witty and groomed to the teeth.
But, if your party is Seafair, don't ask. The clerk at Tubs in Seattle's University District has lived here all his life. And he's ignored Seafair just as long.
The only event Beyzavi ever attended was one neighborhood parade in Lake City. His parents dragged him when he was too small to resist.
"I have no idea what (Seafair) is supposed to be about," Beyzavi said yesterday. "A bunch of hydros?"
The only time Seafair doesn't bore the socks off Beyzavi is when it makes him really mad.
It did that last Saturday night when he, his girlfriend and a pal couldn't get near Second Avenue for a restaurant dinner for a departing friend. Torchlight Parade madness blocked the way.
Let's hope Beyzavi wasn't stuck on the already-overloaded I-90 bridge yesterday when Blue Angels practice runs shut down traffic. It'll happen again today.
Just what Seattle needs with its other bridge bashed.
Still, there are some who would gladly sit stalled in the sun during a Blue Angel rehearsal. And one of them is Beyzavi's boss, Seafair fanatic Mike Plonski.
"He's old," Beyzavi joked, explaining his boss' unabashed boosterism for Seafair.
Plonski, the general manager at Tubs, wrapped his arms around Seafair in 1983, the summer he moved here after finishing college, holding tight ever since. "It's tradition. It IS Seattle," Plonski gushed yesterday.
Mostly, he loves the hydro races on Lake Washington.
Where else, Plonski asks, can you spend a whole day sitting on a barge in the sun with the same bunch of friends, watching the boats streak by?
But something's amiss, Plonski admits. Maybe it's generational.
Seven or eight years ago Plonski could barely scrounge a kid to work at Tubs on Seafair race day.
"I had to pay time and a half," he recalled.
Now? No problem. People Farzin's age couldn't care less, he says.
Ask them about parades, Seafair pirates, clowns and dancing clams and they sound like vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney at the GOP convention podium this week saying, "It's time for them to go!"
To a lot of people, Seafair pirates epitomize what is old-timey, anachronistic, even offensive about a celebration whose time has passed.
Beth Wojick would argue that the pirates have been extensively "retrained." They're more civilized, says the president of Seafair.
They no longer grab women out of parade crowds, covering their necks with grease paint kisses and whisker burns.
They no longer scare the squibs out of screaming toddlers.
They don't even pin on pirate badges; they hand them out at arm's length.
Is that progress, I wonder? Or is a politically correct pirate kind of besides the point?
Then, of course, there are the annual Seafair protests.
It didn't start this year with the arrival of the Trident nuclear sub, the USS Alabama, you know.
In fact, I would argue that protests have been the most -- maybe the only -- engrossing thing about Seafair for over a decade.
My favorite year was '91 when Seattle planned, then dumped, a welcome home parade for the local heroes of Operation Desert Storm.
So 1,300 marching troops were tacked on to the Torchlight event, instead.
Thanks, but no tanks, said organizers. Seafair allowed a few empty short-range missile launching tubes into the parade but asked the military to check their other weapons at Seattle's door.
That summer a tiny neighborhood parade over in Tahuyacq on Hood Canal featured a counterdemonstration in the form of a homemade tank festooned with fly swatters.
This year, Seattle City Councilman Richard Conlin introduced a resolution asking the Navy to send sailors but leave the sub at home.
Resolution supporter and Councilman Nick Licata told me yesterday it's time for Seafair to reconsider what, exactly, it's celebrating.
Frankly, matey, I think it's time to reconsider Seafair altogether.
To me, Seafair is a lot like sex. Unless you're directly involved, it looks sort of silly.
Susan Paynter's column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Call her at 206-448-8392 or send e-mail to: susanpaynter@seattle-pi.com
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