Madison Georgia
12.16.2008

While at the Indie Craft Experience last month, someone came up to my booth, handed me a postcard/flier, and told me to apply - it turned out that she was the curator of the Cultural Center in Madison, GA (about an hour and a half south-east of me), and she was working to put together a market festival similar to ICE. It immediately sounded good to me, since I was thinking that I wasn't going to have the opportunity to submit to any more shows before the end of the year. So after getting home that day I went online, checked it out, and signed up. Since it was so close to me, I figured there wasn't a whole lot to lose, other than the entrance fee of $100 and some gas money.

Anyways, the date for the show (Saturday, December 13th), rolled around and I drove on down in a minivan packed with tees, displays, and other odds and ends, pleased with myself for finally remembering to bring a dolly to cart everything into the building.

I found the place easily enough, right off the main road that branched from the interstate. The parking lot was practically empty (not a good sign!), but I figured that was to be expected since it was only 8:00am, the timeslot for the first group to load-in.

The building was super cool, though, a very old red-brick structure with plenty of character inside and out.

Since the show didn't start for 3 hours, I took my time setting everything up, getting it all organized, and then doing some improvisation when I realized I was missing some crucial display hardware. All in all though, I had everything I needed and was ready to go. Now it was just time to wait, and hope that they'd done a good job getting the word out about the place...

Fortunately, it was pretty good. Not excellent by any means (I did about twice as well at ICE), but for a first-time show, I was impressed, and it's always a fun experience chatting with other vendors and interacting with shoppers.



When the show ended at 7:00, it was the usual routine of slowly breaking everything down and hauling it all back to the car. It's worth mentioning, by the way, that all the doorways in the building were too narrow for my bins, making the dolly useless after all!

A special part of the show was that at 7:30, there was a musical guest in the next building, which all the vendors were given tickets to. Amazingly, it was the Bowerbirds! I actually wrote about them in this entry here!. Anyways, that was pretty crazy. And rather than being bummed out by the small turnout, they seemed genuinely pleased to be there and perform for us. It was totally cool.

From there, I drove up a lonely road about a half hour to meet up with friends in Athens, Georgia, at a venue known as 40 Watt, to see Ra Ra Riot. It was an AWESOME show. I actually didn't listen to the CD until just a few weeks ago, and it's quickly become one of my favorites from this year.



Check it out if you don't know em!

Anyways, I finally got home at 2:30, totally exhausted from my being up nearly 24 hours and doing so much... Whew. It's almost reassuring to know that my next show won't be till June!

posted by Mr. Linty @ 8:16 PM,

4 Comments:

At 2:21 PM, Blogger Mija said...

nice treatment to the ceilings haha I like the effect. And wow being up all day on your feet? Glad you had fun and got to see 2 cool bands!

 
At 12:27 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ha I got worried when you said you figured there wasn't anything to lose...like there was going to be some horrible story following!! Glad that wasn't the case. :)

 
At 11:37 AM, Blogger Mr. Linty said...

Nah, it was totally worth it! And the opener for Ra Ra Riot was really great too, a band called Princeton. I've been playing the cd I bought from them a ton.

 
At 11:17 AM, Blogger William Cameron Allen said...

Oh yeah I've known about Ra Ra Riot for a while now. They're pretty tight. This is random but check out Matt And Kim, and Math The Band. good stuff

 

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