Here Comes Bumbershoot (And I Know I Shouldn't Be Afraid of It But I Am)

It’s late at night and I’m scrolling through the Bumbershoot schedule on their super-deluxe Web site, feeling tempted. S. E. Hinton (author of The Outsiders) is coming this year, and there’s a flea circus and a performance by Mt. St. Helens Vietnam band — a tight, prodigious rock act with a teenage drummer that’s surrounded by rumors of genius.

Yet I know I probably won’t make it to the Bumbershoot show. You see, I have a deep-seated 
fear of crowds, a nameless dread of being overwhelmed that can seize me like a sudden flu and refuse to let go. Clinically, you could call it agoraphobia. I have missed many shows because of it, shows I wish I’d seen. Bumbershoot is the biggest, and so it’s attached to a commensurately big fear.

Illustration by Andrew Saeger

Bumbershoot has been here for thirty-eight years, having begun as the little, unintimidating Festival ’71. It is one of the last major city festivals of its kind, a huge endeavor. Michele Scoleri, Executive Director of One Reel, which puts on the festival, tells me, “Basically a week after Bumbershoot is finished we start planning for the next one.” There is always the challenge, says Scoleri, “to keep evolving and changing” to meet the demands of shifting audience demographics. Hence the youth-friendly Web site, full of every twittery tidbit imaginable.

Each year the 150,000-member crowd is controlled by an operations team of around 654 people (line management, public safety, etc.) and served by an army of 700 volunteers who sign up for approximately 1,100 shifts. Remarkably, says Scoleri, “we’ve never had any major disasters.” Cancelled acts are swiftly replaced. Rain comes, but it is usually short-lived. The disasters are minor. Broken guitar strings. Green-room tantrums. Star authors who come down with laryngitis on the eve of their reading. Miles Davis refusing to talk to any white staffers without a black intermediary.

In my family we have a story of a minor Bumbershoot disaster that dates back to 2004. The story gets dusted off and retold every year around this time. It happened to my sister, Julia, one of the paid temporary staff, and although it was short-lived it has become the height of black comedy to us — tell it again, we say. It’s called the Platinum Pass Nightmare, a tale of helplessness and humiliation.

On a blistering hot Saturday, Julia worked the booth handing out Platinum Passes, a fairly recent invention. Pay an extra one hundred dollars a day, and you get special treatment: access to air-conditioned rooms, reserved seating, VIP entrances, beverage coupons.

The line formed and Julia took her place next to another girl. Who promptly disappeared. Along with their only walkie-talkie. The first man in line gave his name, awaiting his prepaid pass and his drink coupons. Julia looked down to see a pile of paper: printouts of badges, six to a page. The badges still needed to be cut out on the dotted lines, and there were no scissors in sight. The pages were not in any order, alphabetical or otherwise. It was a pile of chaos she was looking at, as the line stretched out and the heat intensified.

“OK, sir, just a moment, I will find your name,” she said, searching page after page through the enormous random list. The heat was on, in more ways than one. The promise had been one of air-conditioned rooms and here this red-faced girl could not find a way to let them in. When she finally located a person’s name she had to carefully rip the square out. She felt like she was onstage, in peril of a pelting by vegetables. She held back tears.

Spotting a volunteer walking by, she yelled for help: “NONE OF THIS HAS BEEN ORGANIZED!” Her cry went unheard.

To every I-paid-good-money rant, she could only say, “I am sure it will be fixed soon.” Indeed, after a few hours of the Platinum Nightmare, the girl with the walkie-talkie returned, volunteers converged and order was restored. The heat-struck people in line calmed down as they realized the breezy accommodations would soon be theirs. They could use those drink coupons. So could Julia.

Incredibly, Julia plans to attend Bumbershoot this year. Not me — not this time, anyway.

So why does my bravery vanish in the face of a crowd? Is a phobia like this irreparable, or can you drink some tea, do some special yoga pose to get over it? In a search for cures, I google “phobia” and come across a remarkable document called “The Phobia List.” A work in progress copyrighted by a man named Fredd Culbertson, it is an ongoing attempt to name all human fears — 530 at last count. Here’s a partial list:

Cainophobia: fear of newness, novelty
Ephebiphobia: fear of teenagers
Genuphobia: fear of knees
Heliophobia: fear of the sun
Pluviophobia: fear of rain
Kathisophobia: fear of sitting down
Ligyrophobia: fear of loud noises
Macrophobia: fear of long waits
Aulophobia: fear of flutes

Of course all these fears could be grafted onto Bumbershoot. Yet the festival continues, even thrives. The crowds file in, the Fun Forest ticket takers are inundated, the grilled corn is to die for. Chaos does not break out (except in the imaginations of the fearful). Beauty erupts, never to be forgotten: see the YouTube of Neko Case’s 2008 performance of “Vengeance is Sleeping” for proof. People move in a controlled swarm, held together by a common desire: to witness an act they will remember, about which they can say, “I was there.” Maybe someday soon I will conquer my neurosis and be able to say I was there, too, despite 530 terrifying reasons to stay home.