The 8:13 Festival of the Song, College Park, Maryland
August 13, 2006

(Originally written on August 14, 2006)

Yesterday I worked at The 8:13 Festival that was held at the College Perk coffeehouse in College Park, Maryland. It was a struggle for me for a variety of reasons. First of all, I had just came home from the 10-day car trip to New York, Montreal, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts the day before and I was still feeling the exhausting effects of that trip.

If that wasn't enough, we had an incident with one of our cars. Prior to the trip we had purchased the new 2004 Honda Civic hybrid car that uses far less gas than the more traditional gas-only car. My husband had been driving the 1991 Honda Civic hatchback that was literally on its last legs. When we got home from the trip Saturday night, my husband had to go back to his old 1991 car to retrieve a few things because he had agreed to chaperone our church's Youth Group, who wanted to do a lock-in (which is their term for a slumber party that's held inside the church building). The main reason why we didn't stay a little bit longer through Sunday in Massachusetts was because my husband agreed to assist in this Saturday night sleepover prior to the trip and I figured that if he wanted to do this, I might as well work at The 8:13 Festival the following day so I sent in my registration form and my $10 vendor fee before we took off on the trip. (I definitely would not have worked at this festival had the trip been longer than it was.)

As my husband was retrieving the things from the old car, he closed the door and the windshield totally shattered, which shocked the hell out of me when he told me about it. My husband is the science sort (he works at NASA) and he explained that glass can sometimes become fragile with age and the lightest thing can make it shatter.

Well, my husband went off to supervise the teenage slumber party and I stayed home that evening. I had a hard time getting back to sleep because I was still wound up from that trip. By the time I managed to get to sleep, I heard a loud rap at the door so I got up and there was a cop outside. Usually seeing a cop at your home in the middle of the night means bad news and I feared that something horrible had happened to my husband. Well, the reason why the cop came by was the shattered windshield on the 1991 Honda Civic (which looks like someone had broken into the car) so I had to explain what had happened.

I couldn't get back to sleep so I ended up spending the next hour-and-a-half sorting through photos from the recent trip and checking out a few doll forums until I felt sleepy enough to go back to bed.

I woke up on my own at 8 a.m. but I felt totally draggy. I tried taking a mid-morning nap after breakfast but I only felt slightly better. I came extremely close to just skipping the festival but then my rational side took over and I managed to get to the festival and set up just in time for the festival's 2 p.m. start. (Click on any of the photos to see a larger version open in a new window.)

The 8:13 Festival was one of the smallest festivals that I've worked at so far. The festival was held on the grounds of the coffeehouse and I was one of only three vendors who showed up to work. I had a bit of luck shortly after I finished setting up my table when someone bought a necklace off of me because she fell in love with it so much. I thought that was a good sign of things to come so I settled in and waited for more sales to follow. I was also enjoying the fact that unlike last month's Festival of the Song, the weather was really nice. The temperature was in the 80's, the humidity was very low, and I was located under a very shady tree so it was a perfect condition for an outdoor festival.

The 8:13 Festival was a mix of music and politics and the whole idea is to register voters just in time for the mid-term elections in November. The first couple of hours alternated between a musical act, a few words from the MC (who's an aspiring stand-up comedian), and a speech from candidates who were running for various county and state offices. After that, the whole thing shifted over to an all-music lineup that consisted of local area bands.

The attendance was light the first few hours but I was warned in an e-mail from the festival organizers that this was to be expected and there would be more people showing up as the day went on. Sure enough, more people did come to the festival, especially at sundown when some of the bigger area bands took to the stage. I got some more browsers but no more sales. In fact, that necklace I sold early in the day was my only sale, which was a bummer for me. I was glad that I only paid $10 for the vendor space because it was a bust for me. At least I did a little bit better than the other two vendors who were there because neither one of them sold anything.

There was a table inside the coffeehouse where people could register to vote. During my trips to the bathroom throughout the entire festival, I saw one or two people registering at a time but the table didn't look very busy.

If I had to do the festival over again, the only thing I would do differently is to emphasize the jewelry more and have fewer dolls on display. That's because, unlike other festivals I've been to, this one attracted mainly college students (which isn't a surprise considering the fact that it's located just a few miles north of the University of Maryland) who had long outgrown Barbie but were too broke to even consider buying the more mature and more expensive Asian 1/6 dolls. There were only three elementary school-age children there early in the day and they were interested in my dolls but their parents told them no.

Even though the festival ran until 10 p.m., I decided to do some discreet packing and rearranging of the vendor table around 6:30 mainly because I loathed at the idea of packing my stuff after 10 (especially since my stuff wasn't selling very much). Every few minutes I would take a Barbie fairy doll and pack her away while removing a necklace from the cork board and placing it in that doll's former spot. I worked slowly in order to not alarm the festival organizers. I kept on slowly packing the Barbies until every last one of them were put away. I then began to slowly pack the Asian 1/6 dolls and replacing them with necklaces from the cork board. Once the dolls were packed and the cork board was empty, I hauled all of them to my car.

By 7:30 one vendor had packed everything up and left the festival. The other vendor hung around but by 8 p.m., she decided to pack her things up as well, She hung around the festival checking out the bands for a little while longer before she left.

Despite the fact that I now had necklaces for sale, most of the people at the festival either socialized with each other or basically watched whoever was playing on stage at the time. As the sun began to set, I realized that the coffeehouse had no outdoor lights other than the stage lights and I was having a harder time seeing anything in the dark. So I quickly packed everything and I left the festival at 9:30 p.m. (I was the last vendor to leave and I left a half-an-hour before the official close.)

Given the disappointing sales at the last two summer festivals I worked at (last month's The Festival of the Song and yesterday's The 8:13 Festival), I'm going to hold off on working at any more festivals until the fall. (There were a few other summer festivals I had considered working at but I hadn't registered at any of them.) I'm going to use the time to work on other sections of my website and get some other promotional materials together.

We also need to take my husband's old 1991 Honda Civic and get rid of it fast. Last night we had a return visit from a different police officer who noticed the shattered back windshield so I have to sweep up the broken glass, do a thorough search of the car to make sure there aren't any valuables lying around, and re-park the car in such a way that it won't attract the attention of the police thinking that a burglary had happened.

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