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life in Austin. It's a spectacular place, so you have to go outside. There are glaciers and whales to look at, cabins in the forest to rent, monster fish to catch, and berries to pick. Berry-picking may sound like a lark, but bears really like berries. It can be unexpectedly extreme.

I have a lot of complicated feelings about folk music. Ignorance, some liking, more disliking. Music-wise, I prefer to rock. But I realize more must have happened in folk music since Woodie and Arlo Guthrie, the Weavers, and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, but what? So it is to Collette Costa that I turn for enlightenment on the subject of folk music and staying sane in Alaska. I have been to a potluck on Collette's boat, but mostly I run into her at the Alaskan Hotel bar and in the studio of the low-power community radio station we broadcast from, KBJZ.

Collette
is the Morning Madam, waking the good people of Juneau, sometimes like a gentle mother, but sometimes with a verbal slap upside our heads. Collette is one of the founders of the Pelican Boardwalk Boogie, a long-weekend music festival in the remote fishing village of Pelican, population 120. She is a singer, the former lead vocalist for the now-defunct Pastor Lunchmeat and the Pimentos, of Haines, Alaska. Other Pimentos were Greg Bixby, a Haines fisherman (gillnetter) and bassist who has performed with Willie Nelson. She is also a cook on a summer charter boat, a veteran of the "slime line," a frequent emcee at local arts events, and general gadabout town.

Geek Weekly: Collette, how did you get here from Detroit?
Collete Costa: I came to Pelican for the first time ten years ago on a flight from Detroit to Seattle. After my car had been stolen in Detroit, I'd had enough and had to get out. From Seattle we took a redeye to Juneau. We slept in a bathroom in the airport, on a couch we found in there. Then a charter plane to Pelican. I'd seen the "Make $10,000 a Season" ads for fishing operations in Alaska, so I came to work in a cold storage facility, processing fish on the "slime line". And 22 hours out of Detroit I was starting work processing fish. When the float plane landed at the Pelican dock, I felt I had literally stepped onto the set of Popeye. It was 300 people then, no roads or cars. It smelled. There was a man yelling obscenities who looked just like Bluto, who I worked for years later. I said to the friend that had come with me from Detroit - she was the person who got my car stolen, so I made her come, too - I said, 'Where the hell are we?'

And as we stood there on the dock, the float plane we came in on took off. We were met by a nice girl from the fish plant, who acts like we should be really happy right about now, a real snow job just like the ads that got us here, and she takes us to the company store to get rubber everything. Pants up to your chest, really stiff new, long rubber gloves, and lime green hats that we soon found out are the mark of the

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