A Flashback Friday presentation from May 3, 2021
Boat show attendees rarely get a glimpse into the after-hours life of people who staff the booths selling their products. Not being twenty-year-olds, there do not seem to be too many wild parties at these. You set up one day, then run a booth for eight to ten hours for several days. Following this you break down for the drive home.
One aspect of doing shows is the evening routines of dinners and social get-togethers. At these stories get told, repeated year after year, and sometimes enlarged upon. My son Nick had a tiny bit of celebrity for always keeping a crisp new dollar bill and offering to buy expensive boats for cash on the barrelhead right then and there. Only quick action prevented him from attempting to buy the USS Constitution from its commanding officer.
Strange things happen at shows. And they become grist for the story mill at dinner.
One of the strange incidents was the couple who chose to break up very loudly and publicly in front of my booth. You hate to interfere in such a moment. But you hope that they remove the action to a less public area—especially a place away from the booth space I am renting for about two hundred dollars a day. Visitors stay away from a spectacle, so my booth remains empty as long as this goes on and I lack the traffic needed for sales. Then the young man began to bawl loudly about how she was his life, and he could not live without her. Now they were attracting a crowd. But no one was buying my goods – they were busy watching a Shakespearean tragedy unfold on the waterfront.
That evening, I told the tale to friends at dinner. It seems that it was an almost day-long train wreck, and my booth was not the only one visited. One friend pointed out that on the far side of the noisy restaurant sat the lovely couple deeply gazing into each other’s eyes and so closely embracing that it was a bit suggestive. Somewhere near the end of our long table, someone shouted out, ” Hey! Get a room!”
The table erupted in laughter, and the embarrassed couple paid up and presumably found a room.
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Ah love… Great story.
Martha, I miss those shows just for the entertainment value of watching the people attending.
I understand that! Now that our local craft shows are so big and people come in selling retail stuff you’d find at Walmart, they’ve lost that vibe. I guess the world changes and we change, too.
Your observation on the state of the craft market is spot on!