Stories from the faire

[fbhjr]

Saturday morning as I walked away from the morning meeting, the faire general manager came up to me.
“Do you like clam fritters?” He asked.
“Yes.”
“That place has the best I’ve ever had,” he said, pointing at a food booth.
I went over to the booth. A man and woman were setting things up. I knew it was still 45 minutes until the faire opened.
“When will you be ready?” I asked.
“Right when the faire opens,” the man said.
One minute after they opened the gates I was back.
“A dozen clam fritters,” I said to the man.
“I can do that,” he replied, but continued to set up things around the food truck.
I waited.
“What was it you wanted?” The woman asked a minute or so later.
“A dozen clam fritters.”
“That will be twenty dollars.”
I slapped at $20 bill onto their counter.
“Make this man his clam cakes!” She shouted at the man.
“I’m setting up our Halloween decorations!”
“He paid in cash! Get him his food!”
He went back to make my food.
“Thank you,” I said to her.
Later in the day I was told by others that truck had great food, but long lines.
I was not surprised.

Day 2 my wife and I stopped at the Wawa near the hotel for breakfast and I got us lunch sandwiches at the same time.
As I ate mine in the early afternoon a man came up to me.
“Are you going to eat all of that?” He asked.
“Yes.”
“I’ll trade you half of my bag of chips for half your sandwich,” he said, holding out an opened bag of chips.
“No thanks. I bought this sandwich for my lunch, and I’m going to eat it.”
He frown, but walked off.
At the end of our 3:00 show he came up to me.
“Did you eat that whole sandwich?”
“Yes.”
“You deserve it, you have the best show here.”
Nice complement. But, he can get his own sandwich.

I was told that some faire customers complained that they weren’t allowed to bring their own food into the faire, but found Wawa wrappers in the trash.
Makes me wonder about folks who paid to get into a faire to look through the trash…
(My wrapper went into the trash bag at our booth, so couldn’t be what they saw…)

Sunday before we drove north we bought more sandwiches at Wawa, but this time it was peak time.
I was worried when my order was number 60 and as I took it they called out that 17 was ready.
As time went by a firefighter came in and ordered.
We waited. He kept looking at his number as the orders were only in the 20’s.
It took more than 20 minutes to get to my number. As I got in the car, I saw him walk out to the waiting fire engine and was glad no call came in during that time.

The “Indestructible woman” stopped by our tent as we were setting up Friday. She was telling us that the year before it had been so muddy in the parking area that her husband lost a boot to the mud and the effort it took to get it back.
I couldn’t help thinking “this woman pounds nails into her face as an act, how could mud stop her?”
But, everyone has their weakness. And, I guess it was her husband’s boot, so it didn’t stop her…
(https://www.krystalyounglove.com )

Sean The Whipsy Rover was quite upset we didn’t have the same set up as last year. Last year it was just him and us sharing a stage and he did continuous whip lessons (and sales) when we weren’t using it.
This year there were two other acts using it with us, so no time for him to take over and give whip lessons (and sales).
He sells the whips for $40 each and last year sold dozens.
So, it makes a big difference to his bottom line.
We tried to set up some space on the other side of our tent so he could do it and not interfere with the acts on stage, but it wasn’t much space as there were other vendors pretty close.
Day two he took over some empty space at the other end of the faire when he wasn’t on stage and that increased his sales and made him happy.
I can’t lie, not having continuous cracking next to us was not a problem for me.
I don’t want to deprive a friend from making money either, but if he wants to spend most of his time selling whips instead of actually doing a show, he should be there as a vendor not a performer and get his space laid out as such.

The other thing going on is the town of Salem wants to hire us for their winter festival between Christmas and New Years. I’m not as big a fan of Salem as some. (My family left before that whole witch trial thing and has been reluctant to go back ever since.)
We spent a lot of time talking about it with Tom and Casey this weekend as we’d need them for the fire bits.
They wanted a 3, 5 and 7 day proposal. 5 & 7 are a lot of days to give up of our holidays, so it was priced that way.
Tom did up the proposal based on our conversations and did a great job with it.

We’ll see what they say.