FABULOSA Four-Day Festival Celebrates Women

On September 25-28 in Groveland's Spinning Wheel in Yosemite, women will come together for the 7th Annual FABULOSA, a four-day festival that celebrates women in music, film, arts and education.

Women, their families, and friends of all genders are invited to come swim, dance and commune with other festival attendees while raising funds for organizations serving women and children. FABULOSA celebrates women via live bands from the Bay Area, Texas, and Portland; and DJs; a film fest; workshops; a healing arts marketplace; and a crafts fair. After taking place at Walker Creek Ranch outside of Petaluma, California for the past four years, Fabulosa has moved to Spinning Wheel, three hours from the San Francisco Bay Area.

The FABULOSA collective was initially the idea of San Francisco Mission District club El Rio owner, Dawn Huston, and musicians, Judea Eden and Jenny Hoyston, and has grown to a dozen members over the past seven years.

FABULOSA 2014 live music entertainment includes the Anita Lofton Project, Vacation Eyes (Houston), Bestfriend Grrlfriend, Average Dyke Band, Tru Bloo & Wanda Kruda, DJ Chelsea Star (Portland), Shelley Doty, DJ Glitter Disco (Austin), The Galloping Sea, Bad Ass Boots, Hearts of Animals, DJ Venus In Furs and the Solid Gold Campfire Singalong Band.

Anita Lofton is a guitarist, singer-songwriter who knows her way around wah-wah, smallstone, and rat pedals. As former lead guitarist for the all-black-girl rock band, Sistas In The Pit, she toured Europe and China, and later North America opening for Iggy Pop and The Stooges.

Vacation Eyes is a Houston-based band featuring Jenny Hoyston of the internationally known all-women band, Erase Errata, on guitar, trumpet, and vocals. Their deconstructed, minimal funk sound has been entertaining crowds in the southern states since 2012. Saxophonist Mlee Marie rounds out the horn section of this dance-worthy act, and bassist, Maricela Varela, and drummer, John Baldwin, drive it all home with relentless rhythms.

Bestfriend Grrlfriend is a riot grrl influenced post-punk duo featuring Naomi Violet on drums and vocals and Shawna Shawnte on guitar and vocals. Their music reflects a myriad of influences, ranging from 80's all women dance-rock band, ESG, to acts on the modern hip hop charts like Drake.

And The Galloping Sea is a Bay Area queer band, a loud moody ambitious rock quartet featuring great harmonies and a punk rock trumpeter. Fast and loose music nerd girls (Margaret Hitchcock, Lauren Wooley, Heather Weisbrod, and Christy Schaefer) who welcome angst, beauty and joy, they create layered textured catchy songs influenced by 19th century romanticism, existentialist teen novels, and horses on fire in that one French flick.

Proceeds from FABULOSA 2014 will go to charities with a focus on women and children in need, in Northern California, including the Mountain Crisis Services, a program of the Alliance for Community Transformations, is a non-profit dual Domestic Violence/Sexual Assault agency serving Mariposa County, CA; and the POWER and Causa Justa/Just Cause (CJJC), who work to improve conditions in their neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay Area and contribute to building the larger multi-racial, multi-generational movement needed for fundamental change.

FABULOSA is not for profit and sponsored by El Rio.

Fabulosa is scent free, green, community driven, volunteer and feminist. Partners include El Rio, Mountain Crisis Services, Frameline, Betty's List, Causa Justa/Just Cause/POWER, Queer Camp, Girls Rock Camp, Green Mary, Ella Print, Girl Army, Dyke Central, Girl Pages, Epochalips, REVOLVE: Spectrum Annual LGBTQ Oakland Pride Creative Arts & Film Festival.

Four-day passes for the 7th Annual FABULOSA fest range from $155-250, depending on your lodging. For information, visit www.FABULOSA.org