TODAY AND TOMORROW, some pix from Saturday’s Seafair Torchlight Parade, just for the fun of it. (We’ll write about the Democratic Convention sometime within the coming week. Promise.)

The theme this year was “Fifty Years of Rock n’ Roll.” Most entrants interpreted it as an excuse for Elvish fetishism and Fabulous Fifties fetishism.

A local Hare Krishna congregation created a float based on Yellow Submarine, perhaps the first rock n’ roll movie to be partly influenced by Eastern culture, albeit in a corporate, watered-down way. But then again, rock n’ roll itself was originally a corporate, watered-down corruption of black R&B.

The Langston Hughes Cultural Arts Center offered the best interpretation of the theme—a preview of its forthcoming mixed-race production of Grease, that venerable musical depicting the ’70s version of ’50s nostalgia.

As you may have read, 1954 wasn’t just the year of Presley’s first recording. It was also the year of the Brown v. Board of Education court decision, which broke previous legal excuses for segregated public schools. As John Waters explored in Hairspray, racial and other suppressions were integral to the story of that not-really-so-quiet decade. The freakish unreality of ’50s nostalgia culture, as evinced in Grease (one of Waters’s favorite films), re-interpreted this revolutionary era as A Simpler Time. A more multicolored Grease would be an alternate-universe fantasy, in which a wider swath of America’s youth would’ve had the opportunity to wear the silly clothes, sing the silly songs, and live the fluffy little romances.

Think of it as a healing image.

Speaking of inclusion, longtime local Latino political activist Roberto Maestas was picked to be Seafair’s honorary “King Neptune Rex” this year. He’s accompanied by Jeanine Nordstrom, who, like most female members of that family that got rich selling clothes to women, doesn’t get to do much at the company.