Saturday, October 5, 2013

All Verklempt

When you plan something on the scale of our Town Day for as long as it takes to plan Town Day (six months off and on plus three months of hard-core "on" as the day approaches) it is virtually inevitable that something will go wrong.  Murphy's Law sees to this, in fact.

This event has an incredibly large number of moving parts.  Exhibitors.  The coordination of parking.  Food vendors and all their related inspection and insurance issues.  Demonstrators (yoga, Zumba, the like.)  An antique vehicle show.  A baking contest.  Pony rides.  A petting zoo.  A kickball tournament.  A large-scale hot air balloon sendoff.  Inflatable rides for the kids.  Performances by two bands, involving rearrangement of bleachers and the setting up of a stage.  And this year, to top it all off, an aerial acrobatics show by three World War Two-era airplanes in the afternoon and a fireworks display to end the evening.  When I say that planning this event is an undertaking (and a massive exercise in patience and paperwork) I am not exaggerating in the slightest.  And I am the chair of the group responsible for planning it, and have been for the past three years.

Usually, what derails the event (or at least some subset of the day's events) is weather.  For a while, it looked like there was going to be rain today, which would have really been rotten.  When I woke up this morning, the first thing I did was go online to check the weather forecast.

The rain never materialized.  The weather was warm and mostly sunny.  And EVERY SINGLE MOVING PART moved the way it was supposed to.  Everyone showed up.  Everyone did what they were supposed to do.  The few logistical hiccups we had were easily resolved.  It was absolutely uncanny and utterly amazing.  Only in my dreams would the whole crazy convoluted day come together exactly the way we planned it!!

Except that this was real, and it did.  I actually choked up during the fireworks...it was an absolutely perfect day and I was SO overjoyed that everything worked out after we worked so hard to pull it together.  And clearly I will have to resign my chairman post forthwith, since we will never, ever top today's success and I have zero desire to preside over an anticlimax.  :)


1 comment:

  1. Glad it all worked out. And you sound like me - once i do something perfectly, I am done. Moving on.

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