Posted on September 27, 2007
This weekend will be filled with more than football, families and crowded restaurants. At Natural Chimneys Regional Park in Mount Solon, the weekend will be filled with music, dancing, camping, vendors and even spaghetti as Spaghettifest returns for its fifth year.
Local band Midnight Spaghetti & The Chocolate G-Strings is hosting its annual charity music festival Friday through Sunday at Natural Chimneys about a half-hour from campus.
The event will span three stages over three days and two nights, and features 35 bands ranging from classic funk to dance rave and everything in between. The proceeds will be donated to The Patients’ Fund for Creighton University, PMP (Pseudomyxoma Peritonei) Cancer Research Fund. Seth Casana, the organizer of Spaghettifest and a member of Midnight Spaghetti, recently lost his mother to the disease.
The hope of Casana and fellow organizers Mickey Glago and Kevin Boyle is that the event will not only raise money to help support further study of the extremely under-researched disease.
Spaghettifest 5 has become the most ambitious verison of the festival to date. It is hosting more than twice as many groups then previous years. This year’s festival will also rival most others with regard to variety. Local bands Bitchnugget and Electric Baby will start off the festival with heavy punk, followed by the innovative hip-hop of Future and Blatant Vibe. Saturday at noon will mark the special reunion performance of Dangus Kahn & The Tornadoes, and the day will be filled with everything from D.C. group The Pietasters’ ska tunes to the 9:30 p.m. funk explosion of host band Midnight Spaghetti and the Chocolate G-Strings. Sunday will feature local favorite bluegrass group Red River Rollercoaster and folk rock groups, These United States and Heart Gets Monkey, followed by Virginia’s own Richmond Afrobeat Movement, just to name a few.
But there’s much more to Spaghettifest than great music.
“Spaghettifest has a very relaxed, welcoming environment,” Casana said. “Most of the people who attend also camp, so there is a little community that develops over the weekend. It’s the kind of place that makes you feel melancholy to leave.”
Unlike major festivals such as Bonaroo and the Virgin Festival, Spaghettifest also makes an effort to retain the local flavor of the Shenandoah Valley and preserve a sense of intimacy. Though the audience is largely comprised of college students, the festival also welcomes families and crowds ranging from children to grandparents.
The event will also feature clothing and jewelry merchants, handcrafts, a massage therapist, band music and merchandise as well as food to keep festival-goers occupied throughout the weekend.
This year Spaghettifest set high standards, hoping for somewhere between 750 and 1,000 people to participate and raise $2,000 for the research fund. Over the past four festivals, the events have succeeded in raising thousands of dollats for other organizations such as the Fanconi Anemia Research Fund, The OrangeBand Initiative, Habitat for Humanity and the ALS Association.
“For over five and a half years after being diagnosed, [my mother] would go out dancing, study history, volunteer, bike ride and live as she desired,” Casana said. “I was surprised to learn that some of her friends around town did not know that she was ill and were completely dumbfounded to find that she was no longer alive. Upon reflection, this made more sense, as they had only seen her when she was out doing what she did best, which was to live in such a way that, through her example, gave others permission to achieve excellence.”
In the spirit of Casana’s mother’s enthusiasm for life, Spaghettifest is about more than enjoying music. It’s about enjoying life and each other.
Tickets are available now for $35 at Plan 9 Music and will be $50 at the door. For more information on artists, the schedule or directions see spaghettifest.com.
For more information on PMP and the research fund, visit pmpAwareness.org.
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