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Your Seattle Weekend Cheat Sheet: Sept 21–23, 2018

by Stranger Things To Do Staff • Friday at 6:47 pm

Celebrate the beginning of fall at events like Saturdays Luminata—a luminous parade filled with lanterns, glowing umbrellas, and incandescent costumes—or check out our complete fall events calendar.
Celebrate the beginning of fall at events like Saturday's Luminata—a luminous parade filled with lanterns, glowing umbrellas, and incandescent costumes—or check out our complete fall events calendar. Kelly Wardle

Congratulations, you've made it to the weekend! All week long, we at Stranger Things To Do have been posting lists of Seattle events to prepare you for this moment, but if you haven't been keeping up, don't worry—here are the basics to get you started on your weekend planning adventures.

If you're excited it's finally fall...
Celebrate at the Fremont Arts Council's Luminata light parade (Saturday at Green Lake), Lucky Envelope Brewing's beer- and mooncake-filled Mid-Autumn Festival (Saturday), or Schack-toberfest: Glass Pumpkin Patch & Harvest Art (through Sunday at Schack Art Center).
See more: Our complete fall events calendar

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News • Slog AM/PM

Slog PM: A Racist Seattle Cop, Another Police Lip Sync Video, Man Arrested for Running Over Emus

by Nathalie Graham • Friday at 6:08 pm

Hey, saying the N-word is wrong.
Hey, saying the N-word is wrong. NATE GOWDY/ Getty Images

Slog PM today is brought to you by Vancouver Island Brewing Twisted Stalk Blackberry Helles: I’ll be honest, this tasted like a Coors Light mixed with a blackberry Izze, you know, that fizzy sort of soda drink they used to have at Starbucks?

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Alternatively, it tasted like a watered-down Capri-Sun with dry hops. I’m on Vancouver Island currently. It was my third beer of the night. The first two were much better but I forgot to take a picture. As one of my favorite authors says, so it goes.

Uh-oh, a Seattle cop is racist: A long-time veteran of The Force (otherwise known as the “Seattle Police Department) used racial slurs, including the N-word. Apparently he left last year after the department opened an internal investigation about the whole racial slurs thing. He quit instead of, inevitably, being fired. SPD hasn’t released the whole case file.

Oh my god, there’s another cop lip sync video: I cannot believe we still have to endure this. The Pierce County Sheriff’s Department decided to get on the summer’s hottest cop trend on the first day of fall. You all need to endure this. Give this sheriff’s department an Emmy stat! Maybe a Tony? I’m not sure what the award is here. All I know is that my favorite art form is the cop lip sync video.

King County prosecutor challenger suspends campaign: Daron Morris, a King County public defender was battling Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, his first challenger in 11 years, for the position this election season. Honestly, he was a pretty compelling and progressive candidate. Today, he suspended his campaign because of health reasons. He didn’t elaborate and asked for privacy. I guess we’ll never know what could’ve been, Daron.

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News

Lime Bike Raises Prices After Competitors Leave Town

by Lester Black • Friday at 5:30 pm

These Lime Bikes just got a little more expensive.
These Lime Bikes just got a little more expensive. Lester Black

Dockless bikeshares are great for getting around Seattle but they also seem to be effective tools for illustrating economic theory.

When we replaced our failing publicly-supported docked bike shares with the yellow, orange, and green bicycles of private companies, services became cheaper and used more widely.

Riders took more trips in their first three months of private operations than the city-funded program carried in its entire 2.5 year life, according to SDOT data reported by the Seattle Bike Blog. Perhaps this was the private industry showing its superior efficiency over public programs?*

Well, if private business is more efficient at providing services then they are also more efficient at demanding more money for those services. Just two weeks after Lime Bike's last competitor left town they are now raising their rates.

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City

Mayor Durkan on Climate Change Leadership and Why She's Slowing Down So Many Seattle Transit Projects

by Greg Scruggs • Friday at 5:14 pm

Mayor Durkan
Mayor Durkan NATE GOWDY

If you care about the future of the planet, odds are you paid attention to what took place in San Francisco last week at the Global Climate Action Summit, where California Governor Jerry Brown issued an APB to everyone not named Donald Trump and not working for the U.S. federal government to talk green in the city by the bay.

Plenty of Washington bigwigs heeded Jerry’s call. The Stranger spotted Governor Inslee making the rounds as chairperson of various blue-state climate Rebel Alliances fighting the big red Death Star—a perfect metaphor for a climate-fucked world, no? Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien got written up in the New York Times for trying out electric bike-share for the first time. (Really, Mike? You’ve never been on an electric-assist LimeBike? I bet you can see one out your office window right now.) Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson announced that the company will let 10,000 green storefronts bloom—but not fix the glaring problem that their coffee still sucks. State Senator (and apparently bad-ass surfer) Kevin Ranker told us about his plan to halt any possible offshore drilling in our waters.

And when PR people found out I live in Washington—cuz even climate change advocacy has PR people—they got all hot and bothered about the prospect of Initiative 1631—the carbon fee on this year’s ballot—passing, and swore that Washington will be the center of attention in November if it does.

So what does the leader of our fair city think about all this? Mayor Durkan was in San Francisco too, and this week, she let The Stranger ascend to her seventh-floor City Hall mayor cave—yes, it has a sick view of Mt. Rainier—to talk about the summit and her climate action plan.

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News

Did Sawant Illegally Support the Showbox? Two Lawyers Weigh in

by Lester Black • Friday at 4:52 pm

Did Sawant break the law in rallying for the Showbox?
Did Sawant break the law in rallying for the Showbox? Lester Black

The fight to save the Showbox theater was dealt a major blow earlier this month when the property's owner sued the city for $40 million, arguing the temporary protections were illegal. One of the primary arguments in the lawsuit is that council members like Kshama Sawant violated a state "fairness" statute by privately communicating with their supporters before the final vote.

The law requires officials conduct business in a fair and open way when dealing with certain "quasi-judicial" decisions like specific land use actions—did Councilmember Kshama Sawant’s rallying of Showbox supporters violate this law?

I asked two land use lawyers and both had a similar analysis: the council may have violated Appearance of Fairness (AOF) law, but winning a case based on this statute is difficult and the court may ultimately decide that this law doesn't apply in this circumstance.

Chuck Wolfe, an affiliate associate professor of urban design and planning at the University of Washington College of Built Environments, told me if he was filing the lawsuit he would have included this same claim.

"I would have raised this issue as well. However AOF claims can be hard to succeed with (and prove) given the many exceptions and definitional elements," Wolfe said in an e-mail.

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Labor

UW Offers Employees Half Off Transit Passes After Workers' Demonstration

by Rich Smith • Friday at 4:25 pm

The demo worked! Kinda!
Members from SEIU 925, SEIU Healthcare 1199NW, WSNA, WFSE, AFT, UW Faculty Forward, and UAW 4121 marched in solidarity. SEIU 925

On Wednesday approximately 200 people representing a number of different unions shut down traffic for 15 minutes near the intersection of Montlake and Pacific. The unions want the University of Washington to provide free transit passes to UW employees in an effort to combat climate change and to reduce projected gridlock in the U-District as the university expands under its Campus Master Plan.

The pressure appears to be working. Today Brian Weitzner, elected member of the bargaining committee for the postdoc unit of UAW 4121, says UW is prepared to offer employees half off its U-PASS, which would reduce its price from $50 per month to $25 per month. Weitzner says the union hasn't accepted the offer as of now and will continue to push.

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Huffington Post Declares Diets Are Over! They Never Worked Anyway!

by Suzette Smith • Friday at 3:35 pm

GettyImages-157399380.jpgDiets are over! We're not doing them anymore!
SochAnam/Getty Images

On Wednesday, Huffington Post's Highline dropped a beautifully researched long form piece by Seattle journalist Michael Hobbes explaining the grand misconceptions we—but more importantly our m-f-ing doctors—have about the health risks associated with obesity. From the article:

About 40 years ago, Americans started getting much larger. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 80 percent of adults and about one-third of children now meet the clinical definition of overweight or obese. More Americans live with “extreme obesity“ than with breast cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and HIV put together.

And the medical community’s primary response to this shift has been to blame fat people for being fat. Obesity, we are told, is a personal failing that strains our health care system, shrinks our GDP and saps our military strength. It is also an excuse to bully fat people in one sentence and then inform them in the next that you are doing it for their own good.

The piece, titled "Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong," is a well-written, empathetic read that reports the demeaning experiences many overweight people have had when trying to get advice from their doctors about non-weight-related concerns. Furthermore, it asserts that pressuring patients to diet doesn't work because diets don't work. Doctors should know about this but "according to a 2015 survey, [medical] students receive an average of just 19 hours of nutrition education over four years of instruction."

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Transportation • Education

The Multinational Corporation That Runs Seattle School Buses Regularly Leaves Students Waiting for Hours

by Katie Herzog • Friday at 3:19 pm

GettyImages-911249988.jpg
asiseeit/Getty Images

Update: Over the 2017-2018 school year, Seattle Public Schools contract with First Students Transporation was for a whopping $29,637,160. This contract is good through 2020 with an option to extend.

Last Thursday, parents at TOPS, a kindergarten through 8th grade school in Eastlake, received a message. In an email, they were informed by the school that three buses—the 573, 576, and 578 routes—were going to be an hour late in both the morning and the afternoon. For the foreseeable future.

The message was not unexpected.

Kevin Oshikawa-Clay, a parent at TOPS, told me in an interview that over the three years he's had a child in Seattle public schools, he regularly gets emails or robo calls informing him that his daughter's bus will be anywhere between 60 minutes and two hours late.

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Money • Drag

Local Drag Performers Often Don't Get Paid Enough to Even Cover the Cost of Their Outfit

by Sam Chapman • Friday at 2:45 pm

This shit is expensive.
This shit is expensive. Paulo Amorim / Getty

There is perhaps no more repeated quotation in the annals of drag than the famous Dolly Parton declaration: “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” There’s a good reason why: doing drag, like being Dolly Parton, costs a lot of money. But unlike being Dolly Parton, drag does not pay well.

Once a fringe art form found primarily in dark bars and back alleys, drag has suddenly, and with little warning, catapulted to global prominence with the success of Rupaul’s Drag Race. Queens who once might have resigned themselves to a lifetime of financial uncertainty now, if their mug is blended and their dips are tight, can become international social media superstars.

Drag Race’s success has—pardon the phrase—trickled down and spurred the growth of a cottage industry. There are more queens than maybe ever before, but there are also designers and tailors who make their garments, wig makers who sculpt their up-and-down do’s, and administrators who manage the careers of top-tier queens. There’s no real way to quantify public appetite, but if attendance at popular local shows like Lashes, Rapture, Le Faux, and the Mx. Cast Race are any barometer, a lot of people are into drag right now. In less than a decade, drag has gone from outsider art to primetime entertainment, on air right before Love and Hip Hop. But are these queens making any money?

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Food & Drink • Things To Do • Food News

A New Wood-Fired Restaurant Opens in Beacon Hill and More Seattle Food News You Can Use: Sept. 21, 2018 Edition

by Stranger Things To Do Staff • Friday at 2:25 pm

Homer, the new Mediterranean-inspired Beacon Hill restaurant from former Sitka & Spruce chef Logan Cox, features a wood-fired oven and a walk-up window with seasonal soft-serve ice cream.
Homer, the new Mediterranean-inspired Beacon Hill restaurant from former Sitka & Spruce chef Logan Cox, features a wood-fired oven and a walk-up window with seasonal soft-serve ice cream. Homer via Facebook

This week, Beacon Hill got a new wood-fired Mediterranean restaurant (with a soft-serve walk-up window!) from a former Sitka & Spruce chef, a new bio-dynamic wine bar opened on Capitol Hill, and chefs will gather for an Incredible Feast at Pike Place Market. Read on to learn more about that and all the other essential food news you need to know for your weekend. For more food and drink inspiration, check out our list of Oktoberfest events, our list of September food and drink specials, and our full food and drink calendar.

OPENINGS
Footprint Wine
Sixth Avenue Wine Seller bar manager Kenneth Dillon's new business Footprint Wine—a sustainably minded wine bar specializing in biodynamic, organic, and/or local wines and offering wine on tap as well as in bottles and cans—had its grand opening on Saturday, September 15. The bar also has some food options, including pâté and crostini.
Capitol Hill

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Savage Love

She's Putting Herself Through Med School Doing Sex Work—What Does She Tell the Doctor She's Dating?

by Dan Savage • Friday at 2:16 pm

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I’m a 30-year-old female in my last year of medical school. I’ve been a full service sex worker for the last three years to support myself through school. I’m out to all my friends and family, and they're all supportive, but I’m not out to anyone at the hospital or who could have any influence on my future job opportunities. I’ve been single this whole time or had casual FWBs who didn’t care that I was a sex worker.

I’ve recently started seeing someone I like and could see myself being with long term. I haven’t been in a proper relationship for a while and it’s nice to finally find someone I feel this way about. I haven’t told him about work. He’s also a doctor at the hospital so he’s not in the category of people I can just tell and then if they don’t like it then too bad for them, since I don’t want people at the hospital to know. We are in our early days and we haven’t discussed being monogamous yet but I know that’s what he wants. I’ve been "kicking the can down the road," as you say, to avoid saying "Yes, we’re monogamously boyfriend and girlfriend!’ and then by extension be cheating on him every time I accept a booking.

I'll be a doctor in less than a year and already planned to stop doing sex work after that. So should I tell him about the sex work and risk the consequences? He might not have a problem with it but more likely he will have a problem with it and then there will be a doctor at my hospital who knows. Or should I stop working and be with him? That option would involve moving house and getting some probably more stressful and time consuming job in my final year of med school. Or should I lie to him for another year about the one booking I accept a week or should I stop doing full service and do massage or something else instead and get tested regularly and always use condoms with him and every client?

All of these seem like shitty options to me. Can you think of another?

What Do You Think?

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Film/TV

Earnest and Eccentric: Northwest Local Sightings Film Festival

by Joule Zelman • Friday at 2:10 pm

Experience Elvis Presleys It Happened at the World’s Fair with live commentary from Stranger film editor and resident philosopher Charles Mudede, musician/writer Ahamefule J. Oluo, and the bestselling author/Stranger alum Lindy West.
Experience Elvis Presley's It Happened at the World’s Fair with live commentary from Stranger film editor and resident philosopher Charles Mudede, musician/writer Ahamefule J. Oluo, and the bestselling author/Stranger alum Lindy West.

Seattle doesn’t often loom large in the national cinematic consciousness: Nowadays, even on the Hollywood screen, it’s usually mimicked by Vancouver. Which makes it extra gratifying that, for Local Sightings Film Festival, the city becomes a hub for indie filmmakers who eschew New York or LA for the earnest and eccentric Northwest. Boasting 89 films from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska (of which 20 are world premieres and 14 are features), Local Sightings acts as a showcase and watering hole for regional filmmakers and media artists, who range from emotional storytellers to nature documentarists to political essayists. More than 40 of them will attend, which makes for an opportunity for local professional and aspiring moviemakers to meet at the screenings, workshops, and parties.

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Things To Do

Last-Minute Plans: 74 Cheap & Easy Things To Do in Seattle This Weekend: Sept 21-23, 2018

by Stranger Things To Do Staff • Friday at 1:40 pm

Artisan vendors will sling all manner of sucrose-laden treats at the Sweet Tooth Pop-Up in Fremont this Sunday.
Artisan vendors will sling all manner of sucrose-laden treats at the Sweet Tooth Pop-Up in Fremont this Sunday.

Panicking because you haven't yet made plans for the weekend and you're short on cash? Don't worry—below, find all of your options for last-minute entertainment that won't cost more than $10, ranging from PARK(ing) Day to the Smithsonian's free Museum Day, and from Fall for Zines! to the Hugo House Grand Reopening Celebration. For even more options, check out our complete Things To Do calendar.

Stay in the know! Get all this and more on the free Stranger Things To Do mobile app (available for iOS and Android), or delivered to your inbox.

FRIDAY

COMMUNITY
1. Memorial for Tahlequah's Baby and J50/Scarlet
Bring letters, pictures, drawings, and other offerings to add to a memorial in honor of the resident Puget Sound orcas who have died due to the Lower Snake River dams. The memorial will be placed in front of the Federal Building as a call to remove the dams. You're encouraged to wear black and white in solidarity with our aquatic friends.
(Pioneer Square, free)

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Film/TV

Grisly Murder and Queer Romance Together at Last in Lizzie

by Ciara Dolan • Friday at 1:20 pm

1536961976-shorts-1-lizzie.jpg

In a revealing interview with the Huffington Post, Chloë Sevigny said she’d hoped Lizzie—the new film in which she portrays Lizzie Borden, who was accused of murdering her father and stepmother with an ax in 1892 Massachusetts—would be a “rousing, smash-the-patriarchy piece,” and admitted that director Craig William Macneill’s final product isn’t what she’d imagined.

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News

Daron Morris Suspends Campaign for King County Prosecutor Due to Medical Reasons

by Rich Smith • Friday at 12:27 pm

Hes out.
He's out. JOHN E

Less than 50 days before election day, defense attorney Daron Morris announced on Facebook that he's suspending his run for King County Prosecutor "due to medical reasons." Doesn't seem like he wants to say much more about it, either: "Beyond that information, I ask for privacy for myself and my family," he wrote.

The public defender was hoping to unseat three-term incumbent Dan Satterberg by running with a more progressive slate of reforms. Satterberg was a Republican until last May.

Here's Morris's full post on Facebook:

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