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Mike Hill, chair of the Mariposa Folk Festival artistic committee, and Amy Mangan, committee liaison, turn the cranks on a whimsical music box created by folk artist Rodney Frost for the festival’s successful return to Orillia in 2000.
Colin McKim Packet & Times
Free concert
To mark its 10th year back in Orillia, the Mariposa Folk Festival is holding a "Thank you" concert tomorrow from noon to 5 p.m.
Featuring Don Bray, Alyssa Wright, Dave Christie, Magoo, Jabulani, Keegan MacDonald, The Brights, Aaron Howes and Paul Court, the free concert will take place on Mississaga Street East in the parking lot opposite the Brewery Bay Food Company, one of the festival sponsors.
"It’s a way of thanking everyone in Orillia who has supported us over the years," said Mike Hill, chair of the festival's artistic committee.
Tickets for the festival at Tudhope Park, July 3 to 5, are on sale at
www.mariposafolk.com or at the festival's downtown office, 37 Mississaga St. E.
Children under 16 are admitted free and discount weekend passes for those aged 17 to 24 are still available.
For more information, call 326-3655.
Festival a perfect 10
Mariposa celebrates a decade back at home
Posted By Colin McKim
Updated 1 hour ago
As the venerable Mariposa Folk Festival tunes up for its 10th year back in Orillia, memories flash like coins in a busker’s open guitar case.
Two years ago, the topper was Gordon Lightfoot, ever the trouper, piping into the jaws of a sabre-toothed lightning storm as half the bone-drenched audience ran for cover and the other half puddled closer to the stage.
Even with his manager pleading with Lightfoot to abandon ship, the hometown legend plowed into the storm, strumming the wet chords of the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Lightning exploded on all sides in forked spears, but no one was struck down.
Four years ago, a wild wind whipped through Tudhope Park, tipping rows of portable toilets, carrying off event tents and knocking out the electrical feed to the main stage just before the Friday night show. The beer tent, which was still anchored to the ground, suddenly became the stand in for the main stage with snow fencing pulled back for the crowd and the licence suspended.
The show did go on.
A few years earlier, Hells Angels huddled near the main stage, sounding a sinister note during a Steve Earle performance. Once again, the dark clouds passed without a casualty.
Despite wind and rain and shadowy characters, Ontario’s oldest folk festival has led something of a charmed life since returning to Orillia where it began in 1961.
Even the year the beer tent ran dry on a scorching July weekend, it turned out one of the volunteers was the manager of the beer store with a set of keys.
An emergency, after-hours beer run was successfully carried out.
“We have a picture of a pick-up truck loaded with beer and people sitting on the cases and smiling,” says Amy Mangan, the festival’s artistic liaison.
Mangan, whose first volunteer job was running the lock-up for performers’ musical equipment, says it’s been wonderful to watch the folk festival sink its roots in Orillia after returning to the city in 2000.
After a few shaky years, the festival has steadily built its audience and is recognized for the seasoned and fresh talent it showcases every year, Mangan said.
Tudhope Park, the spacious, semi-wooded public park on Lake Couchiching, provides the perfect setting, she said.
“It’s beautiful and it allows us to cater to families as well as bringing great entertainment.”
For Mangan, one of the delights of the festival is seeing up-and-coming artists, such as Sarah Harmer or Serena Rider, break out of obscurity.
When Rider first performed in the festival’s showcase for unknown artists, she was a barefoot, 18-year-old with an acoustic guitar and a big brash voice.
“I remember hearing Serena,” said long-time artistic committee member Sandy McAllister.
“That voice was just incredible!”
In the first year, Sarah Harmer, an unknown singer from Kingston with homemade covers on her CDs, performed at Mariposa just as her career began to blossom.
Leslie Feist also wowed Mariposa just as her career kicked into high gear.
The story of the folk festival’s origins in Orillia in 1961, only to be drummed out of town in 1963 after swarms of loose-living beatniks and beer-swilling bikers spooked the locals, has been told many times.
Coun. Tim Lauer, who worked hard to repatriate the festival after it moved to Toronto and later wandered from Barrie to Cobourg to Bracebridge, was nine years old the first year the Travellers, Ian and Sylvia and other folkies played at the Lions Oval.
“I just lived a couple of block away from the Oval,” Lauer recalls.
“I watched through the fence.”
He thought the explosion of people in the third year was terrific.
“I thought it was great, but the city didn’t have the police force. It was on the national news — all the wild and crazy people.”
In the 1990s, as the festival fizzling out in Toronto and some of the alternate sites, Lauer, along with councillors Don Evans and Gord Ball made a pitch to the debt-ridden folk festival foundation to bring the whole shebang back to Orillia.
The three, jokingly called the Three Wise Guys, had worked together on the Arts for Peace Festival for years and saw Mariposa as a natural for Orillia.
After three years and further losses, the foundation agreed.
The city made Tudhope Park available for three days in July of 2000 and native son, Lightfoot, agreed to be the headliner, virtually for a song.
“The first year was a huge success thanks to Gord,” Lauer recalls.
“He gave us a huge deal.”
Everything came together beautifully, Lauer said.
“The special buses were running, volunteers all showed up, everything went perfectly.”
In 2001, perhaps because of overconfidence, the festival slid into the red.
But with the help of “a benevolent bank and a line of credit,” we got turned around, Lauer said.
Volunteers have been one of the keys to the festival’s success, said Evans, who along with daughter Becky has organized the folk play area.
For the garlands and floral crowns the children make, the festival has relied on donations from local florists and willow wands a volunteer cuts every year from trees at the Huronia Regional Centre.
Evans says the small stages, the pub, and the artisans village combine with the main stage to create a winning ambiance.
And for the record, Evans denies being in any way responsible for the beer tent being drunk dry.
“I had nothing to do with it,” he claims.
With singer-songwriter Buffy St. Marie, Steven Page from the Barenaked Ladies, Valdy, the Proclaimers and many others, this year’s festival, July 3 to 5 promises to be another memorable weekend, Lauer said.
“It’s a perfect fit for Orillia.”
cmckim@orilliapacket.com
Mariposa 2009 -
