Wednesday, July 25, 2007 - Seattle, WA
Die-hard “Twin Peaks” fans gather in North Bend for 15th fest
Kevin P. Casey / For The Seattle Times
When Rob Lindley, who is in the Army, was transferred to Fort Lewis, he and wife Deanne were thrilled to move to the region where “Twin Peaks” was filmed.
Can you sing like Julee Cruise?
The Twin Peaks Fan Festival kicks off with an unofficial party at 7 p.m. Thursday at the North Bend Moose Hall, 108 Sydney Ave N., North Bend. Meet other “Twin Peaks” fanatics and perform David Lynch-inspired karaoke (I’m not kidding) with like-minded fans.
The official festival starts Friday, with registration at 10:30 a.m. in the Grange Hall, 12912 432nd Ave. S.E., North Bend. If you want to join the festival at this point, you’ll need to fork over $220, and the organizers will only accept cash. That $220 buys you a weekend of food, film, bus tours of shooting locations and dinners with celebrities, not to mention free-flowing booze and other beverages. If you want to skip the shooting locations bus tour, it’s $200.
If money’s tight, you can still head over to the Seattle Art Museum on Friday for a screening of “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” and “Lynch,” a new documentary about the director. The event begins at 7:30 p.m.; tickets are $6 for SAM members and $8 for others. Tickets can be purchased by calling SAM at 206-654-3121.
If you just want to watch the show, you can find both seasons on DVD from Paramount Pictures, or if you get Chiller TV through your cable or satellite subscription, it’s currently rerunning the entire series. More information on the Twin Peaks Fan Festival can be found at its website.
Rob Lindley is telling me about the time he “killed” his daughter and wrapped her body in plastic.
“People were like, ‘Dude, you wrapped your daughter in plastic!’ And I thought to myself, ‘Yeah, that is a bit ironic.’”
The irony he speaks of is only evident to a select few — a devout few, even. He shows me a picture of his daughter, 10 years old at the time, surrounded by a plastic covering and laid out by a giant log on a Pacific Northwest beach, just like the murdered teenager Laura Palmer, from a long-canceled television show called “Twin Peaks.”
Rob’s daughter wasn’t moving in the photo, but I could just make out a smirk on her face. Thankfully her death was short-lived — she later got up and out of the wrapping (it was someone else's turn to use it) and, along with her dad and mom, Deanne Lindley, rejoined the gathering known as the annual Twin Peaks Fan Festival.
Every year, North Bend hosts this international gathering for fans of the early ’90s cult TV show. It’s a place for “Twin Peaks” devotees to hang out with other like-minded folk, trade memorabilia and eat “Twin Peaks”-inspired food (cherry pie and damn fine coffee). It’s also renowned for being well-attended by celebrities. Every year at least one major actor from the show makes his or her way to North Bend to carouse with admirers. This year features Al Strobel, who played the enigmatic One-Armed Man.
A smaller version of the festival was first held in 1992 by New Line Cinema as a promotional tool for David Lynch’s movie prequel, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” which had its premiere in North Bend, where both the movie and series were filmed.
Local couple Pat and Don Shook decided they wanted to create their own festival, one that was about the fans and the show, not a promotional tool for a studio. In 1993, they held the first Twin Peaks Fan Festival.
Lured to the Northwest
Perhaps you don’t recall “Twin Peaks”? It premiered on ABC in 1990. It was canned a little over a year later, due to declining ratings, a sad ending for a show that was ABC’s No. 1 performer the previous year.
Created by “Hill Street Blues” veteran Mark Frost and connoisseur of the strange David Lynch, “Twin Peaks” was unique for its time. It was a night-time soap opera dowsed in a foam of mysticism — a dwarf dressed in red speaking backward dialogue played forward, the exploits of an inter-dimensional demonic voyager named “Bob.”
Shows on the edge of reality often seem to create devout followings. “Star Trek” fans — Trekkies or Trekkers — are the most notable, of course. They dress up as their favorite characters to attend conventions, buy and sell memorabilia and tell stories. Fans of “The X-Files” (a show that owes a lot to Lynch and Frost) gave themselves the name X-Philes. Thankfully, “Twin Peaks” fans do not refer to themselves as Peakers or Peakies. That doesn’t mean they aren’t just as obsessive, though.
The show went off the air with its main character, FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan, currently on “Desperate Housewives” as the creepy Orson Hodge) in a nail-biting predicament. The first season had concluded with Cooper being shot and left for dead — in the last cliffhanger episode, his life and his soul were in grave peril. And then there was nothing.
“It was really frustrating,” says Rob Lindley, 43. He and Deanne had been watching from the get-go, even though when the show premiered, Rob was stationed in Germany, with Deanne getting ready to join him. Rob is in the United States Army.
Deanne started watching the show while she was in the States, taping every episode and sending them to Rob. When she joined him in Germany, her mother back in Texas took charge of the taping and sending. Even with Operation Desert Storm about to kick off, they were never out of touch with the show during its run.
While living in Germany, the Lindleys heard about the festival and desperately wanted to attend, but it just wasn’t possible. In 1999 Rob got a transfer to Fort Lewis and moved to Puyallup.
“I would watch the exterior scenes [of ‘Twin Peaks’], you know? The mountains, and the valleys and the falls, and I thought, ‘Dammit, that’s where I want to live.’”
Trivia and tattoos
He and Deanne now go to the festival every year. It’s helped out Rob’s collection of “Peaks” memorabilia. At our meeting in a Puyallup Shari’s, he busts out a giant black bag filled with photos, magazine covers, notebooks filled with trading cards, as well as pages and pages of handwritten notes about the show.
You see, he’s a “Twin Peaks” trivia master, second only to one, a super fan in California who quotes the show verbatim. (“I’ve got my master’s, working on my Ph.D. — he’s got his Ph.D., working on God-like status,” Rob explains). Rob watches the show and records details others would miss, and then studies his notes in preparation for the trivia contest at the fest. He always places in the top three.
The Lindleys aren’t the only die-hard fans. Chris Mathews, 50, is a local playwright/actor who has written several “Twin Peaks” plays that continue the storyline after the show went off the air. Two of them had productions at the now-defunct Seattle Fringe Festival. He also says he has the largest collection of “Twin Peaks”-related tattoos — seven to be exact — in locations all over his body. Some are lines from the show, some are character references or symbols, and most are recognizable only to other fanatics.
“There’s things in it that intrigue me philosophically,” Mathews says, explaining his allegiance to the show. “Looking beneath the surface, under the bland surface. There's also a romance angle — I think Lynch wants to believe in the goodness of people and the power of romantic love.”
Seattle artist and animator Bruce Bickford doesn’t consider himself a die-hard fan, but when he created scale models of “Twin Peaks” locations out of clay, he guaranteed people would perceive him as such. The models get national attention — two of them are currently on display in a Chicago art gallery.
Other fans want to discuss what the show meant to them, the things it made them think about and its lasting effect on today’s television. I ask what brings the community together. For Rob Lindley, it’s the show’s philosophy.
“I watch it and I see a nontraditional approach to things: You don’t always have to follow the proven, tried method, and you've got to dig a little deeper to find out what’s going on,” Lindley muses. “I’ve always been one of those kinds of people anyways.”
Jordan Chambers, one of the festival organizers, has a similar view. “I really think it was before its time. The early cancellation, the mystery behind it, all these things came together to create a really tight community."
So tight that the Lindleys never miss a festival, even if there’s a war on. In 2005, when Rob was stationed in Mosul, Iraq, he used his 15-day furlough to fly back home and attend the fest. “Some people go to Mecca,” he explains. “We go to North Bend.”
© 2007 The Seattle Times Company