Having looked at all of them, I can't say that I find them particularly out of line, considering what's being offered. Of course I'm one who would attend as a spectator, or possibly as a performer (depending), but not as a vendor.

Since these seem to be fairly specifically "Celtic," I'm not sure I would necessarily characterize these events as "folk festivals" and then condemn all folk festivals because I don't like something about the way these are handled.

I like things Celtic (except for the recent advent of PBS "begathon" specials like "Celtic Women" and "Celtic Thunder," all of which I find very slick, commercial, and a bit artificial), but I'm no fanatic about it. We have a yearly Highland Games here locally, but I've never regarded that as a "folk festival," nor, am I aware, does much of anybody else.

On the other hand, the Berkeley Folk Festivals in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, featuring the singers and folklorists I listed above and specifically about traditional folk songs and ballads, and the Northwest Folklife Festivals currently being held over Memorial Day weekend at the Seattle Center, where you can take in anything from Bluegrass to Appalachian ballads to sheep shearing to Taiko drumming, and drawing and average attendance of 200,000 to 250,000 over a four-day period, are are most definitely folk festivals. The Northwest Folklife Festivals are admission free.

The Northwest Folklife Festival, I believe, gets funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, and by selling souvenir buttons and T-shirts, and they take a percentage of the vendors' proceeds. The Berkeley festivals charged an attendance fee of $15.00 for the entire five-day event. And there were no vendors at the festival itself.

Like I said, Conrad, if you don't like the way others are doing it, organize your own.

Don Firth