In… Seattle



I have this song in my head, and I’m not sure where it’s from. It’s a man’s voice, like Glen Campbell, going “… in Seattle,” with a kind of dip a few notes down and up in the word Seattle. Anyways, that songs is going through my mind over and over again. Far better than Annie’s Song- John Denver- which came up in conversation and my friend keeps dropping lines all the time to further torment. Am I the only one who remembers the man was a wife beater and that song had a creepy treacly element to it? Photo is of a plant I just identified – butterfly bush- it’s a weed here. Very sweet, though.

Seattle is great. I forgot how much I like it. My friend had a birthday & new bathroom party, which brought hoards onto his deck. His wife & I put out quite a spread of snacks, and it was very gratifying to see folks nosh on it all night long. At the end we got in a hot tub and looked up into the sky past the spruce, cypress and redwoods and into the stars. Despite getting a quick summer rain shower earlier that evening, the sky was clear.

In more movie & film memories, Seattle always brings to mind a gem of a movie: Cinderella Liberty. This, from a site about locations of movies in the 70s (the internet has everything). Yes, with Seattle you think Gray’s Anatomy and Sleepless in Seattle, yet I think of an obscure 70s movie about sailors and prostitutes, the pinnacle of which is the son of the prostitute getting good dental work (ah, the 70s.)

Cinderella Liberty
Marsha Mason’s apartment was in the old Colonial Hotel. In 1982, that building has been conjoined with the the Grand Pacific Hotel next door, and today the complex is known as the Colonial Grand/Pacific Condominiums. The address is 1119 First Avenue, and I know this because I live have a unit in this building. In the 1990s I watched Cinderella Liberty from a room which faced the same view (Elliott Bay, the Viaduct) and heard the same sounds (ferry horns) as the movie. At one point, after one of the ferry horns went off, my husband quipped: “Is it real or is it Memorex?” In one scene in the movie James Kahn (sic) gets out of a cab, runs down the steps (still there) on the north side of the building to Marsha Mason’s apartment, and one can see what houses were across the street in 1969-70[?] (around the time the movie was filmed. Note: those houses have since been replaced by Seattle’s so-call “Ban Roll-On” Building).