16 Aug Telluride Mushroom Fest: A Birthday Salute to Art Goodtimes!
The whole town is invited when hundreds of enthusiasts here for the Telluride Mushroom Festival get to honor their leader, Art Goodtimes, with a 30-minute live program on stage at the Palm Theater. Art, known as “Shroompa” to Mushroom Festival regulars, is turning 69.
Pamela Zoline, founder of the Telluride Institute, has a special surprise planned for Art—a puppet performance. Puppetry is a medium Art and Pamela both take great interest in.
Pamela and the rest of the Insittute’s board, whose umbrella the Telluride Mushroom Festival rests under, want everyone to know that the Birthday Salute to Art Goodtimes! is FREE and open to the public, so please invite your friends and neighbors on Monday, August 18 at noon.
“We will gather in the lobby of the Palm Theater, while Art waits on stage, and hundreds of us will enter the theater singing Happy Birthday. Our voices will fill the theater and we’ll let him know how much he means to us,” said Vito Brancato, who returned to Telluride this week for his sixth trip to the Mushroom Festival.
As a long-time collaborator with the Lifton-Zoline family, Art has served in a variety of roles on the Telluride Institute’s board over the past 20 years, including a term as president and a stint as editor of SmallTalk, the newsletter for the Sustainable Mountain Agricultural Alliance (SMALL).
Art Goodtimes photographed by Rebecca Fyffe, 2014 Mushroom Festival director
When Art’s not helping to develop arts and culture in Telluride, he’s generally on his farm in Norwood, where he has lived since 1984. He calls his acre home on Wright’s Mesa the “experimental spud station,” because he grows up to 59 varieties of heirloom seed potatoes without any pesticides and sells his best-adapted Survival Red cultivar at the Norwood Farmer’s Market.
A life-long environmentalist, Art focused on anti-nuclear efforts in California. Moving to Colorado, he served as poetry editor for Earth First! for 10 years, and helped co-found the local environmental group, the Sheep Mountain Alliance. He’s belonged to dozens of environmental groups, and has served on several boards. As a Green elected official, Art has championed environmental issues, received a number of local, state and national awards and served a year as a fellow at the Center for Collaborative Conservation at Colorado State University.
Having worked his way up from cub reporter to editor of several local newspapers, Art has written a weekly op-ed column, “Up Bear Creek,” for one Telluride paper or another for over 30 years. His monthly column, “Looking South from Lone Cone,” appears in the Four Corners Free Press out of Cortez. Past columns have appeared in Catalyst, MountainFreak, and the San Juan Almanac.
In California Art studied with Pomo basket-weaver Mabel McKay. His wall mandala baskets have appeared in several local and regional art shows.
Art teaching family friends Tirsa and Zander to hunt mushrooms.
When Art was asked why he has given so much of his time and energy to the Mushroom Festival over the years, he had this to say:
“The Telluride Mushroom Festival has meant a lot of things to me. At first, I was delighted to rekindle my California passion for pot-hunting by assisting the founders, Manny and Joanne Salzmn with their wild mushroom conference. Then, through my work with deep ecologist Dolores LaChapelle and the insights of mycophilosopher Gary Lincoff, I came to realize that what we had transformed into a festival in Telluride was actually a revival of an ancient hunter-gatherer activity and that the Mushroom Festival was at the cutting edge of exploring our Paleolithic fascination with all things fungal, including our entheogenic past and present. Finally, I’ve come to realize that as wonderful as the forays and lectures and workshops are, it is the parade that provides a powerful ritual experience of mushrooms as friends, allies and us.”
In honor of Art’s birthday, his son Rio wrote the following poem:
Orator, poet, politico
it wasn’t always this way
before the mycorrhiza and piccole patate viola
before the beard which could be confused for the mycorrhiza
before the steady cloud acre where chaos and tranqulity collide and get along just fine
before good times there was mom’s flailing butcher knife, the loss of a brother,
unelected time on San Francisco’s streets foraging for some urban equivalent of fungi
and yet, somehow, my father emerged from all this hardship with a boletus edulis sized heart
and to me, my father’s life long pursuit to open his heart to the natural world and to all beings is his greatest accomplishment of all
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