This originally ran Oct. 10, 2014.
Now it’s Friday, and I've already given you an idea of what’s going to happen today. Let’s hit some highlights of the rest of the weekend. In the first place, Church and Pennington Streets will be closed to vehicular traffic on Saturday and Sunday. The Community Matters and Sponsors’ booths will be on Pennington Street, while folk artists and Low Riders will occupy Church Street. More folk arts demonstrations will be found in the Old County Courthouse.
There will be about 100 folk artists demonstrating and discussing what they do. You can see Ukrainian Easter egg decorators, rawhide braiders, African-American hair stylists, and a spectacular demonstration of Turkish paper marbling. There will be Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Turkish calligraphers. There will be Mexican and Yaqui paper flower makers, Polish paper-cutting, and Mexican piñata makers.
On Church Street you'll get a chance to meet Yaqui and Tohono O'odham artists and craftspeople. Many of our invited artists will offer hands-on experiences; others will have some of their work for sale. New to this year's festival will be Hopi quilting and basketmaking, and a Persian jewelry maker.
A little farther south on Church you'll find this year's low rider "Show and Shine" display. The Dukes Car Club is in charge of this part of our festival, and they have invited other local clubs to participate. There should be some great new and vintage cars, and even a few bikes.
We’ll be showing a movie at 9PM Saturday on the Global Rhythms Stage in Jacome Plaza. It’s the PBS documentary “Deaf Jam” about a deaf teen from Israel entering into the slam poetry scene with the help of a young Palestinian slam poet. The program will also include guest spoken word poets and the MC from Tucson Youth Poetry slam.
All three stages will be going strong, with the usual wide variety of music and dance. You can pick up a free program at the festival, which will give a complete list of everything we think is going to happen. I mentioned the Special Programs in Tuesday’s blog; suffice it to say that we’ll have the traditional TMY mix of music and dance genres, including many old friends and some new folks as well.
And as it always has, the festival will end Sunday afternoon on the City Hall Stage with presentations of Yaqui and Tohono O’odham ceremonial music and dance. It’s our tradition to wind up the festival with a Tohono O’odham circle dance, with everyone invited to join hands and join in.
Just to remind you, Tucson Meet Yourself is a project of the newly-formed Southwest Folklife Alliance.
