Noon Over the Mall

Festival of American Folklife

The repertoire of festival stories evokes a range of emotions- funny, sad, poignant, profound. Like all folklore, the importance of these stories lies not in whether the details are factual, but in what the story conveys. Most festival workers' stories share one element: the lessons staff have learned from the festival participants, who have given us elegant solutions to immediate problems and profound insights into more global ones. When you bring together from three to four hundred of the world's most talented and interesting people, amazing things happen. Take the runaway calf in 1975, for instance.

Late one Friday afternoon in July, a rambunctious calf jumped the corral fence on the festival site on the Mall and headed down Independence Avenue to freedom. U.S. Park Police in patrol cars, festival staff in golf carts, and helpful bystanders on foot all took off in hot pursuit. As the Keystone Cops atmosphere intensified, an extraordinary horse handler from the Northern Plains, who was participating in the festival that week, rode up, hat in hand, and asked, "Would you like me to fetch him, Ma'am?" I told him that would certainly be helpful, and off he went, down the middle of Independence Avenue, lasso flying overhead. As rush-hour motorists sat staring in astonishment, the calf, cowboy close behind, made it all the way to the underground parking lot of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. There the cowboy lassoed the calf, calmly laid it over his horse's neck, rode back to the Mall, and released it, unharmed, into the corral from which it had escaped. A Washington Post reporter, who was at the Kennedy Center covering a performance, witnessed the lassoing, and the story made the next day's front page.

The cowboy never really quite understood what all the fuss was about. Out where he's from, calves get away and are returned to the corral all the time. I think he thought we were all a little silly. He was happy to have been able to do something helpful, and delighted with the photo of him and his horse that he got in return, but it was just all in a day's work. And frankly, he told me, he was a little embarrassed by all the attention.

Another often told story involves the juxtaposition in the 1991 Family Farm program of the participants from Indonesia and the farmers from the American Midwest. By the second week, interpreters had gotten several conversations started at the hotel in the evenings, and the groups had been surprised at how much they had in common. A woman in her late 60s from the island of Borneo and a U.S. farmer some 10 years her junior had been sharing ideas about when in a season one should plant, how to know when it would rain, and so forth, and they had forged a strong mutual respect. On the last night of the festival they began to say their good-byes. The woman, emboldened, said there was one question she would like to ask before she left. Why, she wondered, was the farmer always in a wheelchair. He explained that a farm accident had taken away the use of his legs. She smiled a warm smile, gave him a hug, and said, "You are such a lucky man. I know many people who have lost pieces of their soul. You only lost a piece of your body; your soul is complete."

As the festival continues, the stock of stories that staff share late at night grows. It is our hope that members of the audience are also talking to participants and acquiring their own new chapters of festival folklore.

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