Family, fun, fried food, faith
MITCHELL BONDS/Press Rick Bergstrom, left, and Lisa Cesarini help Jorja Cesarini, 8, create a unique T-shirt using centrifugal force while Jorja’s father, Dave, and brother Benjamin, 8 months, watch at the Totally Spun booth at the Post Falls Festival on Sunday afternoon at Q’emiln Park.
MITCHELL BONDS/Press Members of the Beth Shalom messianic Jewish community, from left, Ryan Smith, John Popp, Christopher Bonner Holland and Bill Miller attended the Community Worship and Prayer Service at the Post Falls Festival Sunday morning. Smith delivered a traditional Aaronic benediction in Hebrew during the event.
MITCHELL BONDS/Press Attendees listen to pastor Matt Erickson of Calvary Lutheran Church deliver a sermon at the Community Worship and Prayer Service in the Grand Pavilion in Q’emiln Park at the Post Falls Festival Sunday morning.
MITCHELL BONDS/Press Karleigh Scott offers up a basket of ‘Dirty Fries,’ curly fries with pulled pork and barbecue sauce, at the Country Snack Shack at the Post Falls Festival on Sunday afternoon.
MITCHELL BONDS/Press Toni Black, right, holds some fair food while helping her friend Sheri Cole run her handmade pottery booth. “The food’s been great,” Black said of her favorite part of the fair.
Nicole Brown, 12, left, and her sister Courtney Brown, 14, search for clues in the “Wonderland Escape” room created by 59:Escape of Post Falls for the Post Falls Festival on Sunday. MITCHELL BONDS/Press
MITCHELL BONDS/Press Bill Bozly, left, and Blaine Lee play a cover of “Black Water” by the Doobie Brothers as live music for the Post Falls Festival on Sunday. The duo also played with the Blue Mustangs earlier in the festival.
POST FALLS — The annual Post Falls Festival is all about the little differences that make us all the same and cover our fingers in barbecue sauce.
On Sunday morning, the final day of the 2017 festival, six area churches held a joint Community Worship and Prayer Service in the grand pavilion at Q'emiln Park.
"We planned it together," pastor Dan Chance of Oasis Foursquare Church said. "It's our fifth year doing this, so we've got it honed in."
Pastor Matt Erickson of Calvary Lutheran, who delivered the sermon, said the event takes a bit of planning.
"Really, we start to debrief from this one to plan the next year almost immediately," Erickson said. "We start in earnest about two months ahead of time."
Erickson said the joint service was not an ecumenical service, meaning one that treated all the denominations as the same — the practices of the Beth Shalom messianic Jewish community are different than those of the Summit Northwest Ministries Seventh-day Adventist Church, after all.
"We're not pretending we're not different ... this is something allowing each tradition to be represented in its own way," Erickson said. "It allows us to celebrate the goodness of what God is doing in the community.
"Together, we're the church of Christ, and our differences make that possible."
Also present were members of the Post Falls Church of the Nazarene, and the Community Presbyterian Church.
With the service over, congregants dispersed to enjoy the rest of the Post Falls Festival (formerly called Post Falls Days) — fun both on the park's beach and among the many vendor booths offering everything from wind chimes and pottery to barbecue. The smells of every food from kettle corn to pulled pork to lamb gyros and teriyaki chicken filled the air, luring customers to the many food booths and trucks at the event. But even the beckoning scents couldn't keep one family away from adventure.
Karrie Brown and two of her daughters, Courtney, 14, and Nicole, 12, lifted teapots and looked inside a dollhouse for slips of paper or things out of place in an "Alice in Wonderland"-themed escape room created by 59:Escape and run by Eric and Alicia Zaas. The tent was filled with a mad tea party setup containing puzzles and clues to solve the mystery of a time-traveling thief.
"It's amazing," Alicia Zaas said of the festival. "It's clean, and the vendors, it's huge, they're just very diversified. Post Falls has been very attentive to parking, security — they've done a fabulous job. There's lots of laughter; it's a good, great family event."
Not far away, Rick Bergstrom of Totally Spun used centrifugal force to paint unique and colorful designs on T-shirts, flying discs and souvenir cards.
"I've been doing this about a year, at all the fairs in Idaho and Washington," Bergstrom said as he heat-treated a red, white and blue starry logo onto a shirt for Jorja Cesarini, 8, of Post Falls.
All this to peppy folk pop/alt country tunes like the Doobie Brothers' "Black Water," played live by Bill Bozly and Blaine Lee, who also performed earlier in the festival with the Blue Mustangs. Bozly, with 30 years of musical experience and an average of 150-200 shows per year, loves Post Falls.
"Post Falls is great," Bozly said. "I've been here since '79. It's great to be part of something like this."
"It's a little warm," Lee added. "But the people are wonderful. It's the busiest year I've seen."