Hold them.

[fbhjr]

Sunday at the Maine faire had “interesting” weather. Interesting in the curse way. It went from cloudy, to pouring rain, to sunny, to light rain, to sunny, to cloudy, to light rain over the course of the day. (On the drive home the pouring rain showed up again, but the faire was over by then.)

Just as we were about to start the first fire show of the day the guy playing “The Earl” came up to me.
“There is a band of heavy rain that is going to hit us in about five minutes,” he said. “It will last less than an hour, then get better. We’ve got about 100 patrons here. You need to hold them here. If they go to their cars, even just to get out of the rain, they’ll drive away and not come back.”
“OK, we’ll do our fire show,” I said.
“In the rain?” he asked.
“Under the tent,” I said.
“The plastic tent?”
“We will be careful,” I said.
We looked at each other for a moment.
“OK, I’ll try and gather them for you,” he said.

So, we were careful. Except for the corner of the tent we roped off to use, it was packed with people. I honestly think we had almost all the people there watching us. (OK, to get out of the rain. But, while there, they watched.)

We were very careful. The big tricks we still did out in the rain, but the smaller ones were under the tent. The woman who was the stage manager came by at one point and looked very worried. But, nothing went wrong and just about the time we ended the rain let up.
So, it worked out very well.

Still not my choice of performance areas. But, you make due with what you’ve got.

Comments

[saeble.livejournal.com]

and here I was thinking you'd get your jerry can out of the car, run a ring of gas around the collected patrons and really captivate your audience... :D

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

I think they were afraid I'd do just that...