PORT TOWNSEND, Wash. — First, we need to correct a misimpression we might have left you with. The Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival is many things — a week full of workshopping and jamming among teacher-musicians and earnest students, performances by really good players on multiple stages dotting Fort Worden State Park, and the biggest cultural event of the year here in the artsy-bourgeois capital of the Olympic Peninsula.
But … ain’t no old white folks dancing badly.
These are sit-down shows, a lot like Tom Petty was talking about when, just before the start of an unplugged performance on public television, he said, “If you wanna dance, you can kinda dance in your own area.”
Lots of groovy head-noddin’ going on Saturday. I know you know what I mean.
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Could there be a feud going between Port Townsend Golf Club and Discovery Bay? Port Townsend claims to have opened as a six-hole course in 1896, and it’s said there are news clippings to prove it. I didn’t see them. It closed somewhere in there and supposedly re-opened in 1924 as a nine. Either date is longer ago than 1925, when Discovery Bay, which is supposed to be the oldest public course in Washington, was opened.
The kid behind the counter at Port Townsend didn’t much want to talk about it to a nosy guy with a notebook. Touchy.
You’d have more credibility, kid, if your course looked like there’d been any maintenance done on it since 1924.
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Port Townsend, the city, seems like it has more going on and maybe more affluence than the rest of Jefferson County. That’s not a criticism nor is it a brilliant sociological observation, just that Port Hadlock looks a lot like a depressed lumber town, judging by the beater cars rolling up and down Chimacum Road past our adopted Global HQ.
Which must make it seem like we were sitting around a lot, watching cars go by, when we weren’t dancing, you know, in our little areas.
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