I was a Celtic Booth Bunny

It’s the weekend for Austin Celtic Festival.  After two-three years of sun, wind, heat, or some combination of them, this year we got overcast skies, temperatures in the sixties and seventies, and a slight chance of drizzle, which is really about the best weather we could have asked for.  It’s the kind of weather where people in Texas will actually think about buying woollen ANYthing so Aronal had a run on our lambswool scarves, which pleased her.  Good thing, too, because otherwise she was in a dudgeon about festival management fuckups.  One:  They left the Land of Færie—indeed, they left ALL the sponsors—completely off all the publicity and advertising.  Two:  whoever designed the publicity materials used a green-and-purple combination that’s not bad on the posters, but looks like absolute dreck when converted to black and white for publication in the media.  Three:  a late-arriving vendor whined and complained about her booth location assignment, and the festival management allowed her to move completely across the vendor area and set herself upstream (i.e., closer to the entry gate) from us, and carved out the room by taking away the alleyway we’d requested between our booth and our neighbor’s.  The result is that both our neighbor and we completely lost an entire side of our booths as display space.

We rearranged our space to pull a rack of T-shirts, women’s kilted skirts, jerkins, and sweater coats out in front of the booth instead of letting them languish, which worked very well.  Its intrusion into the passage space meant that people stopped, looked, and often bought.  Didn’t hurt that we marked all clothing in the booth at half price for the festival, either.  This year Aronal only got a ten-by-ten booth space rather than last year’s ten-by-twenty, so we left home a lot of expensive and bothersome stock (wedding rings and upscale jewelry, which we only bring to show that we have them available, not with serious intention of selling any).

And we sold calendars.  The Men Without Pants calendar drew lots of attention and laughs, and several people went on and bought copies for themselves.  I’d come up with a couple of selling slogans (“It’s completely worksafe!  Just think—a whole year of men with their pants off in your cube at work, and HR can’t say a thing!”), and we’d tell them if they purchased the calendar right then, they could have it autographed by Mr. April (Aronal’s SO Orion) and Mr. December (me)!  A couple of times I saw the guy who was Mr. July near the booth when we were selling a calendar, and called him over to add his John Hancock to the collection.  After selling the second autographed calendar, I began to say we were having an In-Booth Event and referring to Orion and myself as booth bunnies.

My shift ended at two.  By that point I’d been standing in unpadded wingtip oxfords for four hours straight, and my feet hurt.  I didn’t hang around for any bands or vendors save a quick trip by the Instant Attitudes booth to see what Russ brought with him.  I ended up buying the bumper sticker that made me laugh as soon as I saw it:  Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?  I predict that Quinn is about to lose her sticker virginity.

After that I came home and flopped out until 5:30, when it was time to get dressed for date night with Hero Woman.  We played Scrabble and drank coffee (me) and cocoa (her) at Epoch, then had dinner at Curra’s north.  After that we were at a loose end, not having planned anything particular (it was something to do with the shortage of money), so we ended up doing another Old Austin thing—going out to Mount Bonnell.  Neither of us had been out there in probably ten years, and it was a nice traditional place for a couple to spend an hour together.  (Some benches or other seating would have been favorite, though; there is NOwhere comfortable to sit up there.)  We left before it was time for the park police to come throw everyone out at ten, and went home.

Now I’m about to bathe in a hurry and go have breakfast.  I’m working a split shift today:  ten to one at the Land of Færie to do geek work, then five to ten at the festival to close and strike the set.

Robert the Bruce plays the iridium bagpipe to an attentive horned frog.  Fnord.