The Multnomah Villager

Colette Cassinelli (yes, she’s Village Beads’ Michelle’s sister-in-law) has added a great set of Multnomah Days Parade pictures to the newly created Flickr group for Multnomah Village. This group is open to everyone, so feel free to go to Flickr and join the group. If you use the following tags, it will make it easier for us all to find your images.

Multnomah Village - for general Village pictures

MultnomahDays2007 - for Multnomah Days pictures

Thanks Collette for all the great pix! I checked ‘em out when we were still in Maui, and it was nice to see everyone having a good time.

That said, I’ve heard from several sources  that the parade is getting a little too big, and seems to go on forever with all the groups that are coming out to be included. There were a couple of parade entries that have caused some additional comments, which I won’t share here, but you can get the gist of things by checking out the Letters to the Editor in this month’s Multnomah Village Post. According to everyone, there were certainly more people in the Village this year - perhaps the fact that it wasn’t 200 degrees helped. Man, last years parade was HOT even in the morning.

Yeah, and I agree with Commissioner Adams on this one - many of the clowns are pretty scary.

For the first time in a long time, we’re missing Multnomah Days. If you need me, I’ll be in Maui. This means that our “secret spot” between the bus shelter and the curb on the corner of Capitol and 35th will be available. It also means that we won’t have any pictures of this year’s event.

So this would be a good time to mention that I’ve created a Flickr group for Multnomah Village with exactly ZERO content in it! So if you take pictures of the parade or general festivities, come join the group and use the following tags:

Multnomah Village - for general Village pictures

MultnomahDays2007 - for Multnomah Days pictures

Let’s see if this thing works…

I’m just looking at our calendar, and I think we’re going to be in Maui at the same time as Multnomah Days this year. I may have to recruit a guest blogger to grab pictures and reports from the event, since the Multnomah Days parade galleries are a popular feature here on the ‘blog.

So I’m not going to go into huge detail just yet, I’ll post again on the topic of this year’s Multnomah Days, but I wanted to get a few thoughts and teh picture gallery up.

A few impressions of this year’s Multnomah Day festivities in convenient bullet-list form:

• The parade seemed at least twice as long this year
• How many churches and day care centers do we have in this neighborhood anyway? (answer = a lot)
• Sam Adams, once again, plays well to a crowd. No wonder he continues to be the favorite politico of pretty much anywhere in Portland. I mean, unless you’re talking about the tram…
• We do NOT approve of the carny vendor types selling cheap plastic swords, trumpets and other carnival junk along the parade route. And it’s not just us, this sentiment was shared by several others around us. There’s a very definite line between our neighborhood festival and the ROSE festival, and we’d like to keep it that way, thanks.
• Free snow cones! Score!!
• We’re a little nervous about the hippie circus guys, but we’re learing to live with it.
• Oh, and we skipped the movie to attend a friend’s birthday, How’d it go?

Of course there are photos. I got shots of most of the parade. There are 67 shots in the gallery, so if you were in the parade - you may well be in one of these pictures. You can use the graphic button at the top of the screen to go directly to the photo gallery from this year. If you’re reading this post on an RSS feed, use this link:

Multnomah Days 2006 Photo Gallery

I’d be happy to supply my full-resolution images, if you’re in one of the pictures, or you just see a shot you like. The full res JPEGs expand to around 11MB, which will give you enough resolution for a 31″x23″ image at screen resolution, or a 5×7 at full offset press resolution (300ppi). It’s more than sufficient for a 8×10 image from an inkjet or photo printer. More Details are on the gallery page.

Here’s a link to Last Year’s Gallery….

Hope you had fun - we saw so many people we knew. Lots of nice suprise meetings along the street, and even my former co-workers Mark and Shari bringing up the rear of the parade in Mark’s vintage Datsun. Same time next year?

As part of the media frenzy leading up to Multnomah Days (this weekend, folks), the Portland Tribune has published this short article pointing out what an Incredible Dog Wonderland the Village will be, come Saturday morning.

I’ve posted a gallery of all my images from the parade at this link:

2005 Parade Image Gallery on Multnomahvillager.com

I am not a photographer, they’re just snapshots. Email if you see yourself (or more likely, your dog).

Well, about 9:20 or so on Saturday, we trekked up the hill to the Village, in order to secure a good spot for parade-watching. There were already a good amount of cars parked all around the side streets, and when we approached the post office, to drop some outoing letters in the box, parade preparation was in full swing.The band was practicing, and we discovered an antique fire-truck that now that I think about it, actually didn’t appear in the parade.

We listened to the big band (the Get a Life Marching Band) rehearse for a bit, and then headed up to the main drag to find a place to sit. Jr. V was thrilled to discover that the inflatable bounce houses and slides were in place again.

We found a great place to sit right on the edge of the curb against the bus shelter outside Acapulco’s and waited for the parade to begin. Soon, the first fire trucks and police cars came down the street.
The parade begins!

Followed by all manner of dogs, decorated cars, more pre-schools than I ever even dreamed existed in one neighborhood, and the marching band. All throwing candy. At some point in the last 20 years, parades have pretty much become a long procession of people throwing candy at the audience. Often quite hard. One must take care not to get clocked by a handful of tootsie rolls. Jr. V returned home with a heaping serving dish of candy. And superballs. There seemed to be a lot of superball throwing on the part of parade participants this year. This is good, since really, how many tubes of “smarties” does one household need, a scant two months or so before Halloween.

I’ll post some more pictures later, when I have time to whip out a quick gallery. Let me know if you see yourself. There will be cars, there will be more of the band, there will be inflatable slides, urban chickens and a person who may have actually been Jeff Parker in a Batman costume!
Really, where else are you gonna see this kind of thing on a Saturday morning?

Multnomah Days was fun as usual. BIG crowd this year. I’ve got a good assortment of pictures (note that this may not be the same as an assortment of good pictures), which I’ll post later tonight!

If you came out - hope you had a good time!

Well, a couple of weeks ago I began to notice the veritable flood of local press coverage for the upcoming Multnomah Days festival. It seems like there is lots more pre-event coverage this year. I have been weighing a pre-event pot of my own for a while, but the Portland Tribune put me over the edge.

Here’s a link to the Trib’s article about those quirky old Multnomah people and their odd festival with the dog parade.

I found this interesting since I’ve been reaching, unsuccessfully, to find a way to articulate the comments I overheard about last year’s parade, from twenty- and thirty-somethings realting to how hokey the local parade is, and how we don’t have any big-time floats or anything, just cars with signs on them and bands, and people dressed up. Oh yes, and dogs. We got us some dogs.

Personally, the parade through the village is one of the highlights of the summer, especially now that Jr. Villager is on the scene. We wlays see people we know, we end up having to dodge flying candy launched at major-league-pitch speed, we see all different breeds of dogs and their owners (they really do look alike you know) and get a chance to partake in overpriced face-painting and get at least one item with a bank logo, sometimes more!

If you read the pre-event coverage, you’ll find that there will be a more village-local focus this year, with the huckster booths being restricted to members of the Multnomah Village Business Association. This is good, last year there was a bit too much of you know, “Rare Tibetan Weight Loss Formula” and “Handmade Woven Leather Friendship Bracelets” and that sort of thing. Although the inflatable kid-slides were a welcome hit.

Come on out this Saturday! We usually hang out in from of the toy store. More info is here….

SWNI News (front page!) PDF
Multnomah Village Post

Note - the Post link is to a June story. Their website has not been updated in some time.