| Salt Lake City |
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| GER |
12 |
16 |
7 |
35 |
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| USA |
10 |
13 |
11 |
34 |
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| NOR |
11 |
7 |
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24 |
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| CAN |
6 |
3 |
8 |
17 |
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6 |
6 |
4 |
16 |
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2 |
4 |
10 |
16 |
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| ITA |
4 |
4 |
4 |
12 |
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| FRA |
4 |
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2 |
11 |
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| SUI |
3 |
2 |
6 |
11 |
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| NED |
3 |
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0 |
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City's square starting to sizzle
Crowds zip through security, enjoy bands
By Diane Urbani
Deseret News staff writer
Between Saturday night and Sunday morning, just about every stereotype and exaggeration about Utah, the Olympics and downtown Salt Lake City fell apart.
First, people found parking spots downtown. Then they zipped through security gates into Washington Square, where the band Agua Dolce's waves of Latin-flavored music billowed from the grand stage.
Nearby, half-naked men danced and beat their bare chests in a tent decked out to feel like New Zealand. They're the Polynesian Club from Utah Valley State College, one of the scores of performing groups heating up Salt Lake City's Olympic festival. The temperature may have been in the 20s technically. But the city made its slice of the party pie warm Saturday night.
Sunday at 11 a.m., another Beehive State stereotype was splintered when people lined up at Washington Square's beer/buttered rum/wine booth. One woman, perhaps recognizing an unusual occurrence, captured it with her video camera.
Downtown festival performers spent last week playing to loose bunches of people, many of whom were security guards. Bands echoed across a nearly empty Washington Square. Children's dance groups strutted for small audiences of parents. And Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson fumed over the disappointing turnout.
"People always talk about wanting more family-oriented entertainment in this city," he said Thursday. "You can't find better family-oriented entertainment than what we have here during the festival."
The turnaround came Friday night, escalated Saturday and sailed through Sunday. That morning on the main stage, Sandy's Oakdale Elementary students blanketed the square with Olympics-oriented songs.
The point of this festival, mused Oakdale parent Maja Wells, isn't necessarily to draw huge throngs the way the Olympic Medals Plaza does. It's more to give Utahns a place to celebrate their own qualities. The children performing on this second Sunday of the 2002 Games "are never going to have this chance again," Wells said.
Even if Salt Lake City hosts another Olympics, her son, Daniel, 8, will be an adult by then. It won't be the same kind of thrill for him. "He's so excited, he just can't stand it," she said.
Other predictions that haven't held up on Washington Square include the ones about long lines and surly police. At Saturday night's peak, when other lines were stretching for blocks around Olympic Square, the Roots store in Park City and Bud World on Main Street, those who chose Washington Square strolled through the entrances inside of three minutes. When festival-goers departed the square, cops at the exits smiled, with a relaxed "thank you for coming."
Dana Clary of Orlando, Fla., decided very recently that she'd make it to these Olympics. She passed up the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta after hearing forecasts that traffic would be impossible and tickets unavailable. "That turned out not to be," she remembered. "I regretted not going to those Games . . . and this time, I said, 'I'm going to do it.' "
Clary, 38, made her plane reservations about three weeks ago, bought some sporting-event tickets ahead of time and then bought some more after she arrived in Salt Lake City. She's been to bobsled, figure skating, short-track speedskating — and to Natalie's restaurant Saturday night, where she had a great time. The weather has been fine, too, even for a Floridian.
Another free showcase of local art and culture, the Ethnic Village, is a 33,000-square-foot contradiction of stereotypes. Those who thought of Utah as monochromatic are finding otherwise when they visit the village tent, 200 South and 500 West, where the NAPAH (Native American, African American, Pacific Islander, Asian American and Hispanic) organization is operating on a shoestring.
Vendors offer foods from Ecuadorean banana cake to Hawaiian rice with huli-huli sauce, and crafts from "new mown hay"-scented soaps to feathered jewelry. But the village is struggling to stay open, said organizer Rami Stewart. Admission is free, but "we need help; we need donations."
A celebration of the state's ethnic groups "is so needed in Utah," Stewart added. "People who say there's no culture here are just ignorant. There would be less friction if we just knew more about each other."
E-MAIL: durbani@desnews.com
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February 18, 2002
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