[Monday afternoon: the neighbors are gone, the garments are still drying]
[Tuesday afternoon: packing the trailer is a puzzle.]
[Wednesday morning: all packed up!]
The Northern California Renaissance Faire ended with a bang! I think I was the only booth manager who was pleased by the rainy last day. Why was I pleased? Well...
Casa de Fruta in September is HOT! We are selling beautiful and warm handwoven outerwear. When people can feel them on their shoulders and appreciate the luxurious quality of the cloth, they fall in love and readily understand why they are expensive. The key is that they have to feel the cloth and love it.
In the heat, it was all we could do to convince people to even touch the cloth. Very few people would let us try garments on them. Sales were extremely slow as a result. On the Friday before the last weekend, I was wondering how I was going to pay all of my expenses.
And then Saturday came. It was overcast in the morning and we thought it would burn off. So did the customers who left their jackets in their cars. Perfect! We had more people eager to try on garments than we had at the whole show. And trying them means loving them and buying them. Our sales were great!
Sunday morning looked just the same, but there were whispers of rain on the way. Thankfully, this didn't keep the customers away. There seemed to be fewer people than Saturday, but there were still plenty and they were happy. Sales were trucking along nicely and then it hit. At about 2:00 in the afternoon the sky opened up. After a couple minutes of scrambling to keep brooms and back stock dry, it was time to focus on sales. We had two attractive things: a huge waterproof pavilion and warm outerwear. A wonderful street performer called "Lady Ettie" came in and provided entertainment, making our booth "the place to be" while the streets turned to mud.
This when it paid off to have 3 sales people. I went into the street and started throwing cloaks on wet shoulders, pulling people in to dry off "until the rain passes". Vibrant and Wonder were inside the booth closing sales and swiping credit cards as fast as they could. People didn't want to let go of these beautiful and warm garments.
When the rain left, so did most of the customers. By 4:00, the streets were quiet, but we didn't mind. We had already closed more sales than we had on Saturday. The final weekend brought as much income as the previous three weekends combined. The show was saved! Bear in mind that I don't make enough to get rich, but at least the show wasn't a bust.
On Monday came the teardown. I could only pay the assistants for one day of work, so we did as much as we could and they left. I stayed with the tent flaps rolled up, rotating garments in the open air until they were all dried and packed away. On Tuesday, I dried the tent itself and began carefully packing the trailer.
This was a real puzzle. The biggest problem lies in the fact that it's an 8' trailer. With the back door, the usable space is only 7' 10". The broom booth is made of 8' timbers. Uh-oh. Well, I came up with a method of packing the timbers diagonally and using them as a wall. The back side of the wall was packed with the tent. The front side got sticks, brooms, and everything else.
The 8'x4' plywood was strapped to the top of the trailer and the 10' tent poles were tied to the van's roof rack. It's a stretch, pulling that much weight with my tiny van, but it's done and off we go!
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