September 7th, 2019 – TPFF Set Up.

The run up for the Takoma Park Folk Festival is a bit of a beast, though it seems slightly easier this year than previously. By the night of the 8th it would become apparent that that’s because of three things :

1. Things are genuinely easier this year. No hurricane so only ONE plan required for the day of! We’re frankly just BETTER at it this year! Even though NO two festivals have been the same since the new administration (of the TPFF, Trump has no effect on this) we’ve still learned a lot and it’s all a lot easier.
   
2. There were things that got skipped. That made some people’s jobs harder day-of, but I had a number of people who said they were doing their jobs who… weren’t… and though SOME of this resulted in last-minute work for me, plenty of it resulted in just after-the-fact GRIPING to me.
   
3. ilyAIMY wasn’t playing. I don’t think I realized how much mental bandwidth this freed up. My day was SO much easier and more relaxed – not because playing’s stressful, but because switching mental gears from organizer to performer and back again is waaaay harder than I give it credit for being!

And so though the week running up to the folk festival was a LOT, and actually Saturday morning (when I found out about one part of the “people being told to do stuff, saying they’d done stuff, and not doing stuff”) from about 1-2am was kind of rough, Saturday itself went just fine. We had a lot of meetings running up to it, but Saturday itself? I ran around, made signs, met with a couple of my stage managers, but found myself doing a lot more of just… making sure things were okay – then discovering they weren’t!