Marilyn Clint is the Rose Festival's Parade Queen, as described by Portland's Mayor in 2015 when a 'Parade Queen Day' was declared in her honor after decades of managing Portland's famous parades. A certified special events executive, Marilyn is the Chief Operating Officer of the Portland Rose Festival Foundation, the nonprofit that stewards Portland's Official Festival. She is also the festival's most passionate story-teller, continually seeking out new stories from the festival's long history.

In The Quixotic Business of Celebration, Marilyn will speak to the impracticality and idealism of festival stewardship. If conventional methods were used to assess the Rose Festival as a business, it should have failed decades ago--but somehow Rose Festival survives and even thrives, despite all the external forces working against it. Marilyn will highlight the year 1913 as an example of this recurring trend.