MARSHALL FASHION SHOW
The Marshall Fashion Show was on the coming Saturday, August 5th. But I am putting the photographs on over the next four days partly because the Marshall Fashion Show is so doggone much fun and partly to catch up on posts before heading to Montevideo.
Marshall is a small town about twenty miles north of Asheville along the French Broad River. The river cuts through a mountain valley on it‘s way to the Mississippi and so the town is squeezed along the steep cut in the mountain with only room for the Main Street.
When I first moved to Asheville in the mid sixties Marshall was a rural county seat which seemed caught in the Appalachian frontier past run by the Ponder family. Warren Wilson College, where I taught all my life, was founded by northern Prebyterian ladies to educate the children from rural mountain counties with poor schools. A good number of our students came from Madison County.
No longer. Warren Wilson has become a hippie college with well to do parents of students with strong green, liberal values and a very gay friendly place. And Marshall has become a mixture of traditional Appalachian values and the home of easterners escaping urban life.
With these eastern liberal imports has come a tradition of rollicking festivals several times a year. There is a dog parade, a Mermaids and Pirates parade and now a yearly Fashion Show organized by a fashion designer and artist from New Orleans. Fashion is a very loose designation for the show since no one would get caught dead on the street in any outfit danced down the runway. It is a time to be outrageous and goofy and to simply have a hilarious time.
The show had been suspended during the pandemic, so this show was much anticipated, very crowded and on a hot August night, very, very hot and stifling. But it was also great fun. Today and over the next four days I will display some of the performers (some in more than one costume) strutting their stuff.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 