West Seattle earns the award for being Funk-ville. The cute shops, dinettes, bakeries, and antique shops stuffed to the rafters with every kind of "junque", are enough to send everyone from aging hippies to youth with dangling ear lobs into rapture. You think youth aren't interested in antique shops? It was packed with them, finding vintage hats, kid gloves, smoking jackets, boots of every description, and hats from cowboy to Fedora. I suspect this all had to do with Halloween, but they seemed to think that the coolest stuff was vintage.
As a reenactor, it is amusing to see youth eagerly snatching up artifacts from their grandparent's time. Not too long ago I had a group of high schoolers come to the fort to see a cooking demonstration in the period kitchen. Presenting to a group of gum-chewing, cell phone addicted, impatient ragamuffins might be daunting, but I love my topic, love kids, and love telling stories, so no matter what they looked like, in I plunged.
They loved the fact that our ancestors knew how to cultivate, harvest and grow what they ate. They hated the fact that they didn't know how the things they used daily (i.e. cell phones, computers, cars) worked. Our daily tools are so complex that if they got time warped back to 1855 they would not know how to make one, nor would they know how to feed themselves. They suddenly felt dependent, and deemed it a weakness. In their estimation, people from the past grew to knowledgeable and capable. When they realized that the fort people knew about "making things from scratch" they wanted to learn how too. When we then took them to cook over an open fire, some of them declared it was the most fun they had ever had on a field trip.
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