Fremont's Summer Solstice Parade

Fremont is a neighborhood in Seattle that is a very artsy kind of place popular with hipsters, hippies, and various non-mainstream types of people. It has a sign that says "Welcome to the People's Republic of Fremont" and there is a prominent statue of Lenin that was moved there after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Every year they have a parade to celebrate the Summer Solstice, and it's a big event in Seattle. I, personally, find parades to be very boring and tedious, but this was quite different from any parade I've ever seen before. Tradition dictates that preceding the actual parade, a large group of people (anyone who wants to join in) can bike down the parade route wearing nothing but body paint. People use a rather liberal definition of "body paint;" some create elaborate "outfits" for themselves while others had no paint at all, obviously preferring to capitalize on the rare opportunity to bike around completely naked in public without getting arrested.

Once all the naked people passed, the actual parade began. Again, this was not a typical parade: no marching bands, no old people riding around in old cars, and no politicians. Instead, you get pretty much what you would expect from a parade in the most liberal neighborhood of one of the most liberal cities in the U.S. Some of the parade was musical (like the group wearing leather, makeup, and tattered old wedding dresses blasting death-metal); some was theatrical (a bunch of 'Egyptian' slaves carrying heavy 'stones' with which to build a pyramid at the end of the route, being whipped along by the pharoah and Cleopatra), and much was political (like Condi, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush chained together as prisoners being herded along by people wearing "Arrest the War Criminals" t-shirts). This last, of course, received a loud cheer from the crowd.

Anyway, words don't really do it justice, so check out the pictures. Pics from Anya's camera (you'll also see a few pics from our friend Alex's birthday party). Our friend Pavel took some even better shots of the parade.