Warped Tour, if nothing else, is a tour that ALWAYS is full of surprises. You find yourself surprised at how much the young fans know about the campaigns we work on, you find yourself surprised at how long you can last in 110 heat, and sometimes, you show up for the show and find out – surprise! – that the truck with all of your stuff on it didn’t make it in. It wasn’t just our stuff that was on the truck – a good chunk of the other non-profit vendors, record labels and other sponsors were in the same predicament. Brian and I are nothing if not hardcore though, and we decided that the show must go on! So we scrambled to put together a mini booth – we snagged a table (our tables came – they were on a different truck – but tables were all that we had: no tent, no totes, no chairs even, but we fixed that by finding a big bucket we could turn over and sit on…) and begged the guys in the Guitar Center Web Lab to let us print off about 80 of our sign up sheets (which kinda worked, a big thanks to them for helping, even though their printer ran out of ink before we were done…) then we scavenged our car to see what we had in hand. Thankfully, we always take our banners and signs with us rather than put them on the truck – they get pretty trashed if we do. So we had those, plus a box of white bands, plus ONE and Oxfam shirts, some literature and pens, so really, we were good to go. I then pretended we were on some sort of designer challenge show – make a booth out of stuff you find in your car and on the ground! – and I have to admit I was pretty impressed with our ingenuity. Clipboards were the biggest thing we were missing, so we made some out of cardboard. They looked a little sad, but they DID fit the overall Warped Tour aesthetic.
The Gorge is beautiful so that countered what could have been a bummer of a day, and the weather, amazingly, was even cooler than Idaho, so we were still excited to be at work. We had three great Oxfam volunteers join us: Adrian, Stephanie and John. Stephanie recently took part in Oxfam’s Change training, so she was very well versed and ready for action. The team did great – they worked all day long and got hundreds of Warped fans involved with Oxfam, and didn’t seem to mind our rather compromised set up. All in all, we made the most of our day – we got hundreds of more people involved with ONE and Oxfam, recruited some new volunteers and got to test our clipboard making abilities…
1 comment:
That day actually sounded like fun. You guys ARE hardcore...
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