My apologies to my readers, my days since my last entry have been rather full with the preparation and execution of the festival. On Thursday at about 4pm, the forecast for Saturday changed from sunny to rain. To avoid the problems of past years, the executive director cancelled the craft portion of the festival and had the craft fair coordinator call all the vendors to tell them not to come. This decision was not popular with many people, including some board members. The real strange thing was, despite the change in the forecast, there was actually a surge in ticket orders on Friday.

The festival coordinator wisely moved some of the tasks to be completed on Friday to Thursday and we spent most of Friday moving sheets of aspenite to staging areas to be used if the grounds got too muddy on Saturday. The executive director also had crushed concrete laid down the length of one of our parking fields. We had done this a couple years ago in another field, but there has been a desire to preserve the green space of that particular field for a few years now. Given that the executive director helped tow 150 cars out last year, I believe he decided the paved lane across the meadow was the lesser evil.

In the end, it did rain, but the mantra of the day was “This isn’t as bad as last year.” It was rather muddy, but because of the preparations and lower volume of rain, only three cars actually had to be towed out. (Other cars got stuck, but they extracted themselves before the tow vehicle could arrive.)

The fact we had less rain didn’t keep the lighting and sound trucks from becoming embedded in the ground. Last year nearly everyone was freed by 10:30 pm, but mysteriously this time I was up until 1:30 am getting the two equipment trucks pulled out. (My contribution actually consisted of shivering in the drizzle while the tow truck crew winched trucks forward, pulled ahead, winched them along a bit more, pulled ahead, etc. However, there had to be a representative of the organization on hand until the grounds were vacated.)

Sunday morning I had to run to Philadelphia to pick up performers at their hotel and transport them to the train station. This probably wouldn’t have been necessary in most cases except they were hauling equipment and instruments which a taxi wouldn’t have been able to accomodate. Then it was back to the festival grounds to start the clean up. As usual, few of the volunteers who signed up to help clean up showed up. We seldom give festival admission to people who only sign up for the day after so we weren’t cheated out of tickets.

The day was long and hard, but fortunately this year I am not a full time employee so I got to go home at the end of the day when my contract was up. The full time coordinator and her assistant will be tackling the remaining portion of the clean up over the course of the week. Most of the heavy work was completed yesterday so they will be faced with tedious chores like putting signs and tables back to where they are usually stored.

I, on the other hand, am returning to my job search and will go back to writing more from a research point of view. As I suspected, if any arts organization tries to have a person blog about their experiences during the process of creating a work, the product might be intermittantly produced due to the demands of the job exhausting the writer.

All in all of course, an enjoyable experience.

So with the 5 day forecast out today, ticket sales for the festival started to pick up. I had already been consulting Accuweather, Weather Underground and Weather Channel websites for the last couple days to see what the festival weather would be like.

Because it rained rather extensively last year, we really need good weather this year to maintain people’s faith in the event. Even if it does rain and the rain insurance helps defray the losses, if the weather is lovely next year and no one buys tickets because they have been disappointed two years in a row, there is nothing to help stave off losses. So far Thursday through Saturday looks beautiful. Sunday looks a little iffy so we are praying the weather system doesn’t speed up any.

Because Appel Farm’s residential arts and music summer camp starts 2 weeks after the festival ends, we will be rushing to clean up the grounds on Sunday. It won’t be too productive if it does rain or have thunderstorms that day. Though the worst thing to have happen is to have a rainy festival day and then a rainy clean up day. It sort of adds insult to injury. You are miserable the day of the event and then miserable cleaning it all up.

I am rather proud of the festival coordinator this year. Not only has she been good about planning the event, she has started dreaming about the festival and waking up in the middle of the night to make notes to remember things. I would be worried if this wasn’t happening to her. It would be a sign she didn’t really “get” the scope of what she was about to create.

In years past I would actually wake up in the middle of the night and call my office voice mail with notes for the next day. Unfortunately, since I didn’t have to actually get up and turn the light on, I would be in a half daze while I dictated notes over the phone and consequently had to replay the messages the next day to figure out what the heck I was mumbling.

Most of today was spent handling rather boring, picayune but necessary details of the festival. I stuffed all sorts of support information into volunteer packets so they would know how to do their jobs better. I moved tents and other equipment to staging areas so that the Saturday morning set up crew will have a straightforward job.

Tomorrow is the big shopping day. While we have someone to cater the volunteer and performer meals, there are quite a number of items that performers request that it would cost too much to have the caterer provide. Tomorrow we will be running to a food warehouse and grocery store to pick up cases of water, soda, beer, milk, breakfast foods, cookies, etc, etc, etc.

We actually had the road manager of one of our performers call today because she was concerned about how closely we were paying attention to the hospitality rider she provided. This is a valid concern because often festivals skimp on such details and treat the performers rather poorly. While we don’t go overboard to ingratiate ourselves to performers, we do pay attention to detail. We have actually had bands announce from the stage that they just had the best meal they had ever eaten at a festival.

We make sure we take care of performers because we are a small festival and there isn’t the prestige associated with playing here as there might be at other festivals where artists will put up with the poor treatment just for the exposure. Taking care of the performers helps us attract bigger and better artists in subsequent years because word gets around that we offer a good experience and people are more apt to say yes.

In any case, we had the woman who heads up the hospitality area call the road manager to discuss any concerns she might have. When our coordinator said she had received the hospitality rider two weeks ago and had been supplied with the shopping list I am going to use tomorrow and that the list specifically noted which items were for the artist’s personal use, the road manager was apparently really relieved.

To some degree it is puzzling to me that performers have such negative experiences in their travels. The type of treatment we offer is not difficult to implement. If it wasn’t for the praise we receive, I would generally assume we are sort of bumbling along at about average. I guess it is a matter of being in the habit of being attentive that makes it so easy to offer good service.