Member Tells About Cotati (CA) Accordion Festival

     I wanted you to know how much we enjoyed the festival at Cotati.  The little park was a lovely setting for just that kind of an affair.  We were there when they opened in the morning and we stayed until about five each evening.  I would estimate the crowd on Saturday to be about eight hundred and on Sunday to be about a thousand.  The mornings were cool enough to warrant a jacket and then by about ten thirty we sat on our jackets.  The first day, we had straw bales for seats and the second day we brought chairs from the hotel.

     As you know, the program was continuous from the two little stages all day long.  We wandered around, talked with Gordon Kohl, watched people polka, browsed through piles of music, ate huge long hot dogs, ate too many ice cream sundaes, and thoroughly enjoyed the entire two days.  We did go to Volpi's on Saturday evening, but I suppose the accordion crowd hadn't arrived yet, so we had a superb Italian meal, saw some very odd fish in their aquarium and took a few pictures. 

     We loved watching them do the Lady of Spain—a ring where oooodles of people from the audience took their accordions up in front of the two stages and everyone played Lady of Spain in the "people's" key of C, then they all played The Beer Barrel Polka also.  It was great fun.

     We would have never known about this type of festival if we had not read about it in our SLAAC paper.  Thank you---Leland Flinders