Artsfest '85 Shows Off Melting Pot Around Us - Orlando Sentinel

I was doing some searching on earlier projects from my life and was happy to re-read this article about my first, big event. Way back in the early 80's, I was hired by the Art Council of Central Florida to help produce the events that they did. I was working at Disney at the time and also running the World Disney World Youth Theater Club, so I was a little sad to leave Disney at the time.

Within a few months of being at the Arts Council, I came up with the idea of an international performing arts festival that would take over the streets of Orlando. Each street would focus on a specific ethnic group from Central Florida, with food, crafts and entertainment.

So we kicked off the first event and worked our butts off. Over 250,000 people attended the initial festival and we were pretty excited about how everything came together. As we were striking the festival and cleaning the streets, the Orlando Sentinel was being delivered and the teaser above the headline was "Rob Morse on the Orlando International Artsfest."

We were all a little worried since Rob didn't always have good things to say about events, but we were very pleasantly surprised to read his piece and I was particularly excited to see him call the festival the Real EPCOT Center.

Although no longer going on, the festival did help kick off a renaissance of the arts in Orlando and some of the groups that were started back then are still around today. It was fun to be able to look back and see the mark that we left with ArtsFest. Thanks for letting me go down memory lane!

Although I expected very little of Artsfest '85, I am happy to report that it was a real street festival, a great street festival -- for my money, right up there with the best. In some ways, it was better than the big-city ethnic festivals.

This was my city, my region. These were the people of virtually every ethnic group and community in Central Florida, turning out to strut their stuff, cook their foods and have a good time. This was the real Epcot Center. It is easy to forget that Central Florida is a melting pot, or salad bowl, of people of different nationalities and races. This is not the land of Beaver Cleaver it sometimes seems. Funny, we go to Epcot to see representations and misrepresentations of different cultures, when those cultures and more are right here, all around us, among us and within us.

In many ways, Artsfest '85 emulated the Epcot model. The presentation of each culture was abbreviated and perhaps a bit stereotyped, at least to the casual observer. But there was more.

Artsfest '85 was a cultural festival, but more than that it was a festival of acculturation. You'll never see a more American street festival.

Artsfest '85 Shows Off Melting Pot Around Us - Orlando Sentinel.