Tinika Ossman-Steier was busy working on a giant insect ensemble for this year’s Solstice Parade as she remembered the pangs and joys of the event’s birth from way up inside her creation. For those too new to remember, the time was 1974, and the place was a building on the corner of State and Ortega streets (now the Fithian Building), which was a warren, a home, a coven of performance artists who haunted thrift stores for inspiration and lived to celebrate. At first, Solstice was conceived as a birthday party for artist/mime Michael Gonzales, but it became a gaudy excuse to greet summer’s freedoms.
“It was the Park Theater then,” said Ossman-Steier, a current festival artist in residence, who was drawn into the free-spirited throng, though she lived up past the Mission in those days. “There still was a theater there, and it was Mime Caravan and [parade founder] Michael Gonzales and [his partner] John Burnett who showed us slides — that’s what we used to do back then, look at slides,” she laughed. “And it was pictures of what Michael wanted [the party to be like], pictures of Mardi Gras and Carnaval down in South America. This was the introduction to the parade.
“We didn’t talk about being pagans back then, but that’s what it was, pagan with a lot of creativity and no politics, and no words and no dogs,” Ossman-Steier continued over lunch recently at Jill’s Place, around the corner from the current Solstice HQ and not far from the old Park Theater. “I think they made me in charge of banners.”
