Occupy the giant chicken of Petaluma

Occupy Petaluma, with a little help from Occupy Santa Rosa, is making the classic all-american goodwill-to-theneighbors gesture, marching in Saturday’s annual Petaluma Butter & Eggs Days Parade, which is themed River of Dreams, Then and Now. A Facebook entry says Occupiers “are busy preparing the giant chicken float, and the Occupy Santa Rosa Band will be rockin’ OP’S entry with a full horn section and singers.” (The site indicates there’s a bit of uncertainty over whether the “12-foot-tall chicken float made completely from recycled materials and propelled by human power” will be replaced with “a floating chicken tent.”)

P.S.: In other news of street parties, performance artist Rasa Vitalia, Ms. Celery 2012, led the San Francisco Vegetarian Society contingent at Saturday’s Cesar Chavez Parade in the Mission. “Only when we have become nonviolent toward all life,” said the late Chavez, a vegetarian, “will we have learned to live well ourselves.”

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Gloriously warm Saturday was a day to relish San Francisco, and that we did. But we also ambled through Japan, then India, and finally to Italy, specifically the island of Linosa (south of Sicily and closer to Africa than to Europe):

We walked through the Cherry Blossom Festival on our way to the San Francisco International Film Festival. There, Micha Peled’s documentary, “Bitter Seeds,” set us down in rural India, where farmers’ traditional ways of growing cotton have been supplanted by genetically engineered methods pushed by American purveyors of chemicals. These new ways are so unsuccessful, leaving the farmers ashamed and in debt, that huge numbers — an average of one every 30 minutes — choose to end their lives.

Did the Cherry Blossom traffic and commotion make it hard to park? Angst over piddly woes melted, as we immersed ourselves in the struggles of the Indian farmers, seen through the eyes of a young girl whose father has committed suicide and who tells the story as a journalism project.

Afew hours later, we were embedded in “Terraferma,” a feature film set on an island where age-old ways of life are fading, and illegal immigration presents a moral dilemma to its fishermen protagonists. The setting is foreign, the issue familiar and heartbreaking: the Third World pitted against folks eking out meager livings.

When the film was over and we spilled out onto Post Street, workers were cleaning up scraps of Cherry Blossom trash. It seemed as though we were returning from afar, from sailing in someone else’s boat, walking in someone else’s shoes. The festival voyage continues.

P.S.: I’m told there was a false fire alarm during Sunday’s showing of “How to Survive a Plague,” about AIDS. When audiences came back, director David France blamed the disruption on local activists who he said were unhappy that the movie focused on ACTUP in New York rather than on work done in San Francisco. The movie will show at theaters this fall.

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Charles Hardy, who found himself among 420 Day revelers at the Gold Cane bar in the Haight on Friday, reports, “It was the summer of 1967 all over again. … The kids were kids, from 14 to 25, just like olden times. The sidewalks were so crowded that after I left, I had to pick my way through the traffic jam in the street. … The kids were just walking too slowly.”