Before Seattle filled up on itself, before the city movers and shakers determined that the Queen City would try to purchase world-class status at taxpayer expense, before it tore down everything that made the city livable and erected scads of needlessly expensive stacked hamster cages with cookie-cutter retail space below them, before I moved here, Seattle was like this.

The city used to not be so serious. Whenever it was, good folks stepped in (Emmett Watson and his marginally tongue-in-cheek "Lesser Seattle" movement for instance) to remind the city to laugh at itself. For far too long, since about the time that Almost Live went off the air (the first time), Seattle has been afraid to break its over-inflated ego bubble.

The fear is that there is a little boy somewhere along our self-congratulatory parade route who will succumb to the laughter and indelicately point out that the Gentry City is, in fact, naked in its acquisitions of greatness.

So, God bless the Ballard Sedentary Sousa Band! Long may they sit!

Billed as "the finest non-marching Sousa band in all of Ballard," it also features the world's only sedentary majorette, Edith Farrar, who takes her place on a folding chair at the front of the 40-or-so-member band.