Baltimore Pride Festival

kent4str & I were to be calling for the Chesapeake Squares this afternoon at their annual LGBT pride festival at Druid Hill Park, Baltimore.

I like Baltimore's pride festival... it's very community oriented, in a great location and generally has good weather.

This year, however.... well, two out of three isn't bad.

The heat & humidity were really ugly. Not as bad as it could have been, but bad enough. I don't deal with heat well.

We had our sound system up in the dance pavillion by 10:30 AM. Towards 11:30 AM, we powered up the generator for system checks and sound tests... all went relatively well. Each dance slot was more or less the same: we started with a single square doing a brief mainstream-level patter, introduced the club and what we do when we had the public's attention, then brought as many folks as we could entice onto the floor for about 15 minutes of quick open-house type calls & instruction. Further plugs for our open house events, our country/western nights, our club night dances, how to get more info, etc. were sprinkled liberally through the lot.

kent4str & I actually have pretty good on-mic banter, sharing the entire experience in a pretty balanced way. We do work pretty well together.

In any case, we had a single square for the 12 PM session, two squares for the 2 PM session and a single square again at 4 PM. Other club members were staffing a booth in another area of the festival and we were distributing contact info & literature at both locations.

I have no idea if this will translate into new recruits, or how many folks filled out contact forms (someone else was worrying about that)... if we come away with only a handful of newbies, I'd declare the day a success.

We were home by 7:30 PM. Thank god for air conditioning, food and a cold shower... I'm feeling much more human again.

Baltimore Pride Festival

kent4str & I were to be calling for the Chesapeake Squares this afternoon at their annual LGBT pride festival at Druid Hill Park, Baltimore.

I like Baltimore's pride festival... it's very community oriented, in a great location and generally has good weather.

This year, however.... well, two out of three isn't bad.

The heat & humidity were really ugly. Not as bad as it could have been, but bad enough. I don't deal with heat well.

We had our sound system up in the dance pavillion by 10:30 AM. Towards 11:30 AM, we powered up the generator for system checks and sound tests... all went relatively well. Each dance slot was more or less the same: we started with a single square doing a brief mainstream-level patter, introduced the club and what we do when we had the public's attention, then brought as many folks as we could entice onto the floor for about 15 minutes of quick open-house type calls & instruction. Further plugs for our open house events, our country/western nights, our club night dances, how to get more info, etc. were sprinkled liberally through the lot.

kent4str & I actually have pretty good on-mic banter, sharing the entire experience in a pretty balanced way. We do work pretty well together.

In any case, we had a single square for the 12 PM session, two squares for the 2 PM session and a single square again at 4 PM. Other club members were staffing a booth in another area of the festival and we were distributing contact info & literature at both locations.

I have no idea if this will translate into new recruits, or how many folks filled out contact forms (someone else was worrying about that)... if we come away with only a handful of newbies, I'd declare the day a success.

We were home by 7:30 PM. Thank god for air conditioning, food and a cold shower... I'm feeling much more human again.