And then came Lake Mary – Heathrow Festival of the Arts. This is still my favorite show. Steve greets me with enthusiasm when I show up pathologically early for setup. All of the staff is friendly and helpful. The customers are friendly and the location is beautiful.
A friend comes to help me with setup. This is my first time setting up the tent without Clif and the pieces seem to have multiplied but we manage to get it up after a couple errors. The only potentially serious problem we have is where to find water for the water jugs which hold down my tent. Despite the name there is no lake near the Lake Mary show and the water has been turned off because they don’t want the lawn sprinklers to come on inside people’s tents. My friend comes up with the idea of buying ice from Publix and putting it in the jugs. Thank God when she goes to buy ice she finds that Publix also sells water. I can just see us trying to feed ice cubes into the jugs. There have been some comedies over the years about filling those jugs. My favorite is another friend crouching on a two foot wall by a lake leaning over trying to fill the jugs from the lake water. The next time that same friend helped me set up he suggested heartily that I fill the jugs at home and put them in the van full. I do that every time now and it makes that part of setup a lot less stressful.
By the time I got to Lake Mary , I had done several shows and none of them could really be called successful. But I had learned a lot and made a lot of changes. Lake Mary is where everything seemed to come together for the first time. I even won my first award, an honorable mention for “Sunset at Lake Magarity.” I’ve made small changes since then; added large pieces, changed the booth layout, taken out the table; but Lake Mary is where I moved from wide-eyed beginner to actually being able to give a piece of advice now and then to other artists.
A friend comes to help me with setup. This is my first time setting up the tent without Clif and the pieces seem to have multiplied but we manage to get it up after a couple errors. The only potentially serious problem we have is where to find water for the water jugs which hold down my tent. Despite the name there is no lake near the Lake Mary show and the water has been turned off because they don’t want the lawn sprinklers to come on inside people’s tents. My friend comes up with the idea of buying ice from Publix and putting it in the jugs. Thank God when she goes to buy ice she finds that Publix also sells water. I can just see us trying to feed ice cubes into the jugs. There have been some comedies over the years about filling those jugs. My favorite is another friend crouching on a two foot wall by a lake leaning over trying to fill the jugs from the lake water. The next time that same friend helped me set up he suggested heartily that I fill the jugs at home and put them in the van full. I do that every time now and it makes that part of setup a lot less stressful.
By the time I got to Lake Mary , I had done several shows and none of them could really be called successful. But I had learned a lot and made a lot of changes. Lake Mary is where everything seemed to come together for the first time. I even won my first award, an honorable mention for “Sunset at Lake Magarity.” I’ve made small changes since then; added large pieces, changed the booth layout, taken out the table; but Lake Mary is where I moved from wide-eyed beginner to actually being able to give a piece of advice now and then to other artists.
