FAIRMONT – Bring your nonni, your popi and all your cousins, too.
Even if it’s in spirit.
Main Street Fairmont’s Feast in July gathering is Saturday, and the event that’s always a summertime opening act to December’s full-on Feast of the Seven Fishes Festival is doing something a little special this weekend.
In honor of the upcoming 20th anniversary this coming Yule, Saturday’s market is setting up a video booth so you and yours can share your favorite Feast memories and holiday memories – for generations to come.
Food vendors and artisans will be part of the pre-holiday happening which runs from 4 to 8 p.m. on Monroe and Adams streets in the city that shows its Italian and Roman Catholic roots with pride.
Heck, you don’t even have to be Italian to serve up a memory, or several.
Visit Main Street Fairmont’s Facebook page for all the particulars on how you can sign up for your time in front of the lens.
From behind the lens is how Robert “Bob” Tinnell served up this Feast in the first place.
Tinnell is a writer and filmmaker who grew up in north-central West Virginia and notched a good living in Los Angeles directing music videos at the height of MTV in the 1980s – before moving back East with his family.
These days, he writes and makes movies through his Morgantown-based Allegheny Image Factory, with many of the works set in Marion County and the surrounding region.
When he first moved back, he settled at Deep Creek Lake, Md., to be closer to his widowed mother.
During one of Deep Creek’s signature long winters, he sketched out a story of a boisterous, fictionalized Italian family (based on his own and others) as it filled the kitchen and readied for Christmas Eve 1983, in real-life Greentown.
If you know Rivesville in Marion County, you most assuredly know Greentown.
That’s the name of the coal camp within the little community, which is situated along the banks of the Monongahela River, around 15 or so miles from Morgantown.
Most of Greentown’s original Italian families were Calabrese, arriving from the same little villages and mountain towns around the Boot – to carve their purchase of the American dream in West Virginia’s chief export.
The camp was so named because the mining operation that established it got a good deal on paint in that particular hue.
All the company houses were painted green.
Tinnell’s Italian grandmother, Isabella Oliverio, a spirited, diminutive lady, lived in the one just down from Our Lady of Assumption, the Roman Catholic parish where she faithfully attended Mass.
She was known on Clayton Street for her endearing, broken English and famous Christmas feast (complete with its requisite, seven varieties of seafood), which she would prepare every season, just as faithfully.
Isabella’s grandson wrote the online graphic novel in 2004 that turned into the hardcover book with her recipes serving as the afterword.
That project, in turn, begat the 2019 romantic comedy that has since become required viewing for Christmas in a lot of households here and there – Italian, or no.
“I was astonished with the response,” Tinnell said.
He still is, he adds – with one happy caveat.
“As pleased as I am with the success of the book and the movie,” he said, “it’s the festival in Fairmont that really is the most gratifying, because it’s home.”
Home, and Greentown, made for his initial foray into the Feast-doings, which, on one particular holiday, set his muse a-glow, just like Rudolph’s red nose.
In the early 1990s, while home from Los Angeles for Christmas, he captured his uncles on black-and-white video with a handheld camera in Isabella’s kitchen – as they jumped in to help the matriarch prepare the meal.
All his uncles were “characters,” Tinnell said, and he wanted to get it on record.
“I was going for their personalities and interaction,” he said. “And I didn’t want my grandmother’s recipes to get away.”
