Festival Report

Registration for the Spring Festival opened yesterday. Because of the hard work of Barbara Moo, Jim King and myself, we have online registration up and running and we’ve given the Festival webpages a fresh look and feel. The flyers look beautiful and we made a special effort to have them available a bit earlier than usual so that we could have them at the Valentine show.

And speaking of the Valentine show, the Festival was able to play a small part in helping to make it a success. When Jim King learned that not enough people had signed up for the Minstrels of Love chorus to make it viable, he remembered the enthusiasm the Festival goers had shown for participating in the chorus at the last Festival. He suggested we use the Festival email list to remind all the past Festival goers about the Minstrels of Love. The email convinced a lot of people to sign up and the Minstrels of Love chorus was saved. Kudos to Jim for thinking outside the box.

With help from the Swingin’ Tern committee, we’ve been working hard on putting together promotional material for our new dance program. Doug Heacock came up with a name for the program, Swingin’ on a Star, and a logo and song parody to match. Bill Cox and Jim King used those elements to come up with a dynamite flyer, which we will distribute at Tern dances. Now we need to make sure that this program is promoted at the Tern dances.

I’d like to clarify what I said about the dance program last month. The biggest problem we are having with the dance is that not enough people are attending, and you need a certain critical mass to make a dance fun for everyone. The money is a factor as well, but the most important thing is that we have to have the numbers in order to keep the dance going. We are hopeful that the Swingin’ on a Star program will do the trick.

Regarding the “no heckling” policy that we instituted at the last Festival, the reaction was mostly positive and we intend to continue this policy at the Spring Festival.

We are currently negotiating with the camp for the 2011 dates. We’re trying to get May 13-15 for the spring. It’s the second weekend, but not Mother’s Day weekend. For fall, Yom Kippur is on Columbus Day weekend, so we are trying to get Sept. 23 -25 to avoid conflicting with the holiday.

I’d like to thank my committee and the folks from Swingin’ Tern for really going all out this month for the Festival.