The Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival was our final California show and it ‘Rocked’ in spite of the wind and the rain. We came prepared with a 40 ft sheet of plastic sheeting to cover and bridge our two canopies together. We also came with a positive attitude and a sense of humor which made setting up our 20 foot booth in the dark with the aide of only solar and head lamps more amusing than stressful.
It was very windy on Saturday and our plastic rain cover acted like a parachute but we were well weighted and John or Alisha would occasionally jump up and grab the canopy struts when gusts of wind threatened to take our booth to the Land of Oz. In spite of the weather, serious customers came out to shop and sales were good! At the end of the day my competent crew of John, Alisha and Jackie lowered the canopies and wrapped our booth as securely as possible to protect it from the nights rain.
Sunday, we arrived at dawn and were delighted to find our booth intact and relatively dry. It drizzled and rained all day and multiple lakes of water continually pooled in our overhead plastic canopy cover. At periodical intervals, John or Alisha would climb onto our table, warn nearby shoppers and announce a waterfall show as they prodded and pushed from below to move and empty the pooled water towards the outer edges of the canopy resulting in our waterfall shows. In spite of the continual rain, the inside of our booth remained quite dry and serious shoppers took shelter within our booth taking ownership of numerous purple boxes stuffed with Marty Magic Jewelry. Miraculously, the sun came out at pack up and between the four of us we had our double booth loaded into the van in record time.
We arrived back at our home studio just after dark and popped a bottle of champagne to toast to a successful end of the season show!
The nine week Maryland Renaissance Fair closed just last week and my Maryland crew has buttoned up our shop until August of 2017. I have a fabulous and seasoned crew but the weather is always the wild card. Between near 100% humidity in early September and a threatening hurricane, the crew sweated and slogged through rain and mud for much of the season. Happily, the weather on the weekend that Alisha, John and I attended was perfect and it was wonderful to see so many friends and collectors.
The show season may be over but the Magic team is now preparing for the onslaught of online holiday shopping so stay tuned for our five day Cyber-riffic Sale, our biggest of the year!