How to have a COOL festival.

If any of you attended the Cantaloupe Festival yesterday in Tarboro, you know it was HOT!   Too hot for the vendors and way too hot for the crowds who huddled under any small patch of shade they could find.

So .... this, of course, got me looking for solutions.  Our July and August (and maybe September) events face the same possibility of high heat and bright sun, so how to we keep things cool?

We don't have to just accept the roasting temperatures, there are many options that we can incorporate to have a "cooler" event. Actually there are three factors we need to take into consideration.  Shade, breeze and hydration.

The shade can be as simple as hand-held parasols and garden umbrellas, to large shade sails and canopies.  I asked about rental prices for shade "tents" from Tar River Rentals and the tent that covered yesterday's stage was $225.00 for the weekend.  With those kind of prices, and since we'll use things monthly, we may want to consider purchasing what we need rather than renting.  We may be able to produce some relatively effective shade with a couple of large blue tarps, strong rope and some ingenuity.

As I explored the web for solutions I discovered that "crowd cooling" is a much discussed topic.  The most popular and seemingly effective way to drop temperatures by as much as 25 degrees, is with misting.  Again, this can be as simple as cheap hand-held mist bottles or battery-operated misting fans, to the larger hose type systems.  Mists can come from above or be ground misting hoses with fans blowing the cooled air.  It sounds like a great concept, something we should explore further.

Fans make the breeze and breeze cools the skin so more fans or bigger fans are needed.  We have a wide range of options here, too, from hand held paper fans to giant blowers. Some fans actually have the additional option of misting. 

Right now, as Grassroots organizers, we need to look at the necessity of crowd cooling for summer-time festival planning in North Carolina from 2 perspectives. 1) what kind of systems can we put in place to make all of our hot-weather T2S events comfortable and therefore ATTRACTIVE? (as in attracting more people to town).  2) what can we do in the next 2 weeks to make our very cool Steampunk July 12th event more COOL?  

Money is a factor that must be taken into consideration as our funds and access to funds is limited.  Perhaps we can get products donated or get businesses to sponsor us and help cover expenses.  As always, your suggestions are most appreciated.

Who knows?

Buddy Hooks from the Arts Council emailed me in response to my T2S meeting reminder.  He let me know that there will be a FREE ice cream social at the Blount Bridgers house this evening at 7:00pm.

I hadn't heard a thing about it and I live across the street from that location, so I asked him how he had publicized the event.  He ran off the list of what he had done; emailed all of the arts council members, posted it in their newsletter, put it in the events listing in the Daily Southerner and had it on the calendar of the arts council website.  It seems like he did just about everything but still I didn't know about the event and I'm certain many others don't know either.

I had a similar conversation with Carol Quigless recently in regards to the Talent Show she is helping to coordinate.  Getting the word out so people will show up for auditions is a lot harder than you think.

I read yesterday about the Farmer's Market opening for the summer.  Three farmers came.... THREE!  Any day of the week I can see more than 3 people along the sides of the road selling collards and peanuts  and locally grown produce.  I wonder when you asked them why they don't sell at the Farmer's Market, if they'd say "what Farmer's Market?" .

This will be the 4th month for Tarboro's 2nd Saturdays and I'm willing to bet that if you stand at one of the grocery stores here in town and ask people as they leave, the majority will still say they've never heard of it.

Now these examples are just a few in a long list of things we miss out on around here because we simply don't know about them.  How do we fix this?

Money is being spent, BIG money, to promote our town and attract new people.  We truly do have a LOT to offer here and most is WAY under-utilized.  Again that strong need for a community newspaper nags at me. Our community could be so much stronger, so much happier, so much more able to see the wealth of what is available to us.  We need to market our community not only to outsiders, but to the people who are already here.  How do we accomplish this?  What do we need to do to create this community network?  Do we need to have a meeting for everyone interested in starting a community newspaper?   Great.... just one problem, how do we let them know we're having a meeting?

The Cantaloupe Festival & promoting Tarboro

This Saturday, June 28th, Tarboro will host the 2nd annual Eastern Carolina Cantaloupe Festival. 

It promises to be lots of fun with more food, more music, blow-up rides for the kids, contests, arts & crafts vendors.  The town closes off a section of Saint Andrew Street and hundreds if not thousands of folks converge on our downtown.

As GOT members, this will be an excellent opportunity to promote the monthly T2S events.  An opportunity to invite the visitors back again every month for fun in our beautiful little town.   It will also allow us to contact vendors,  music groups and craftspeople who might be interested in participating in a future Tarboro's 2nd Saturdays event.

I'll be talking with the downtown merchants this week to give them a heads up if they haven't thought of it already.  Each downtown merchant should put something out on the sidewalk, just as we do for T2S, to encourage the flow of pedestrians to stroll the length of our downtown streets and see all that we have to offer.  The festival is focussed on St Andrew Street and the Courthouse Square, but with a little creativity, we can pull them out and along Main Street as well. 

I'll probably set up a table at 305 N Main (the front of the Marrow-Pitt building) with flyers and information about the Grassroots of Tarboro and Tarboro's 2nd Saturdays. Anyone interested in sitting with me?  Come on down! The more the merrier.   It might be a good time to sign up more kazoo players for the Tarboro Community Kazoo Band and we may even be able to do some fund-raising.

We, as a community trying to grow and become revitalized, need to recognize and take advantage of every opportunity to promote our town and ALL that Tarboro has to offer. 

As I browse the web, I often come upon websites where people can post comments about places they've visited or where they live. I see these as a FREE opportunity to promote Tarboro.  Each time I write a positive blurb about Tarboro, I'm putting it's name out there for people to find. People who may be looking for a nice place to live.  I also use the words "best place to live in NC" as often as I can without being too obvious.  I know that someone out there in cyberspace is wondering and searching the web for information, and I'm hoping that their search for the best place to live in North Carolina will lead them to Tarboro.

Tarboro is a FIT community!

We've been looking for some recognition for our pretty little town, and recently we got it!

Tarboro was chosen as one of the top 3 Fit Communities in North Carolina!  (Here's more from the Daily Southerner ).

As for attracting those pesky retirees, I think we're on the right track.  People are retiring much younger than they once did and these 55 -65 year olds are not ready for rocking chairs on the front porch.  They want to walk, jog, bicycle, canoe, do yoga, do taichi, lift weights and have fun! 

Well, we've got all that right here in Tarboro, bike paths and canoe trails, along with a brand new sports complex, tennis courts, fitness centers and the Quigless Center of Vibrant Health.  The FIT Community classification is ours from 2008 to 2011 and I think we need to make the best of it.  Let's start thinking "FIT" and doing things a little bit differently to enhance our FITness status.

Let's grow our Farmer's Market into a place where we can get all sorts of local produce.  Let's support local growers of organic produce.  Let's get that food co-op off the ground.  Let's start riding bikes and walking more around town, we'll save money on gasoline and get healthier, too.  Let's see if we can make Tarboro the Number ONE fit community in North Carolina.

If we want our town to stand out above all of the other small historic towns as THE best place to live in North Carolina, we need to focus on and promote all of the existing amenities as positive attributes.  We don't have to reinvent the wheel, we just have to recognize what kind of wheel we have.

Speaking of wheels ...  at the next T2S event, I'll be introducing my own eco-friendly fitness-related addition to the "things to do" in downtown Tarboro.  I have purchased a pedicab, a bicycle-powered taxi, which will start off as my personal mode of transportation downtown and hopefully become an "attraction" during the 2nd Saturdays events.  If it's a "hit" we may want to consider a small fleet of pedicabs for in town transportation.  It's SO cute, perfect for touring our historic district, and not nearly as messy as a horse and buggy.

What's going on in Tarboro?

What is going on in Tarboro?  I'm asking you because I've been so wrapped up in taking care of the T2S event that I haven't had time to chew the fat and hear what everybody's talking about.

I often wonder what is going on in other parts of town.  I know my neighborhood is quiet and peaceful, but is it that way for everyone in Tarboro?  I don't know, and I want to know.  We need to know.  It will be difficult to make Tarboro a better place for everyone who lives here if we don't know how everybody here is living now.

Wouldn't it be nice if we had a really good communication network in town.  I've said it many times, if we had some way to reach all of the people, to allow them to share information with each other, so much more positive growth would be possible here.

Perhaps the new town website, instead of just being a marketing tool to attract people TO town, what if it was the hub of the community. The place where everybody could go online, to share important information and stay informed.  That's only good if everybody in Tarboro had a computer and internet access and I doubt if they do.

I want a newspaper.  I want a weekly free community newspaper that is delivered on every Wednesday with the mail to every one of the 9500 delivery addresses in 27886 zipcode area.  I don't yet know exactly how it's going to happen, because I personally do not want to publish a newspaper and I haven't asked Mike Blanton, the publisher of the Daily Southerner,  if he wants to do it.

In the mean time, tell me what's going on in Tarboro. I sincerely want to know. You can comment here, start a discussion on  Tarboro Is Talking  or email me.

Update on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 09:56PM by Grassroots of Tarboro

While we're on the topic of newspapers.  I see there's a job opening at the Daily Southerner, Tarboro's hometown newspaper:

Immediate Opening / General Assignment Reporter
There's even an opportunity for some page design and photography on M-F daily commited to local news, features and photos.
Send your Resume to :
W. Terry Smith, Editor
The Daily Southerner
P.O. Box 1199
Tarboro, NC 27886
or tsmith@cnhi.com