dr_pretentious: (Default)
Sarah Avery ([personal profile] dr_pretentious) wrote2014-07-13 05:02 pm

What Could Possibly Go Wrong At A Festival?

Okay, festival-going folks, I need to collect potential incidents for the Sebastian novella. What are the weirdest, most high-stakes, most improbable, most hilarious and/or most dangerous things you’ve seen happen at a festival? What interesting disasters have you seen averted, or had a hand in averting? Please don’t use names or identifying details, because I don’t want to be party to accidentally upsetting, embarrassing, or libeling anyone. I just need some ingredients to zizz together in the Cuisinart of my fictioneering brain so I can make some story pesto. If in doubt, please respond privately.

[identity profile] evilbunny.livejournal.com 2014-07-14 01:21 am (UTC)(link)
One year at PSG (back when it was in WI), some locals breached the property fence, actually damaging the fence in the process. The local police had to come into camp to see the damage, so people were going around to all the vendors advising them to hide anything illegal (raptor feathers, paraphernalia, etc), and to put on clothing. A bunch of us were at the Druid (Henge of Keltria) camp, I was judging the porter/stout homebrew category. Someone asked "What's the current status?" and Tony Taylor and I both replied at the same time, "We're at DefCon 3."

[identity profile] dr-pretentious.livejournal.com 2014-07-15 03:18 pm (UTC)(link)
The story seems to want an incursion of non-Pagan locals, with perhaps a nighttime car-chase-like scene involving a golf cart and a segway.

I need to scour the web for cowan-in-camp incidents. There's the famous one from decades ago in New England in which some locals saw a bit of ritual theater with a Seven Year King figure, and they believed the guy had actually been sacrificed. Seeing the performer alive and well afterward did nothing to persuade them. You probably know more of the people who were present than I do.

[identity profile] karenjunker.livejournal.com 2014-07-15 10:32 pm (UTC)(link)
The only year I attended Ancient Ways (might have been 85-87, can't remember) there was a bunch of young men from the nearby town who invaded the site -- I was for some reason the only volunteer on duty for security and someone handed me a broadsword and a lantern (it was around 10 PM) and I went after them. I may have been wearing clothes, too, but in any case they saw me and ran off in the direction of the entry road.