What Could Possibly Go Wrong At A Festival?

[dr_pretentious]

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.

Comments

[onyxtwilight.livejournal.com]

Oh, I have a LOT of these. Drawing from various real life events, or from the rumor mill surrounding real life events:

Faeries invoked for ritual and not appeased properly wreak havoc throughout the camp. (I will pay you money if you pick this one and work it in somehow. >:-)

Failure to put the usual ritual protections in place leads to a much higher than usual incidence of disasters of various sorts. (I know that sounds the same as the first one, but it was a different event.)

Intuition about an impending physical disaster doesn't come quickly enough to prevent it. (That was the maypole, this year. Let me know if you want details.)

People being unknowingly dosed with LSD from a horn of mead being passed around at the fire circle.

People under ill-advised invocation going running out into the darkness, and having to be fetched back and managed.

Memorial ritual for a beloved community figure who turned out not to be dead.

Giving inappropriate or inadequate answers to a deity's questions during a ritual leads to a pissed off deity, leading to a rainstorm that floods the camp and sends everyone home -- almost not making it out before the creek rose to cover the bridge.

Portajohn employee who comes in to suck the contents out of the toilets loses control of his truck while rubbernecking at naked tits and puts the whole poop truck into the ditch. Which led to the rule that everyone had to put their clothes back on when the portajohn company came to do the toilets.

While very talented weatherworkers very impressively deflect an impending tornado, festival participants skip through the street singing songs from The Wizard of Oz -- because, as one storyteller noted, in times of great stress, everyone reverts to the Old Religion. >:-)

Woman blissed out of her mind on how much fun she's had wishes aloud, on the last day, that she didn't have to leave; gets her wish when her car won't start, and has to be rescued. (This happened three times to the woman in question before she figured out to stop saying that out loud. I was there all three times. :-)

A ritual involving every participant having a candle, and then coming up and putting their candle with all the other candles, clustered into a metal tray with low sides. . . which soon became an overflowing well of molten, flaming wax, due to the candles all melting one another at high speed, which slopped over the edges and started to set the entire altar on fire. One priestess, alarmed and a bit desperate, did the only thing she could think of: she dumped the big bowl of water that had been used to bless the circle on the middle of the flaming, overflowing pool of wax. Yes, water on a wax fire. The resulting fireball shooting straight up about fifteen feet was impressive, and the fire did go out, and conveniently the whole thing timed excellently with the peak of the power raising, but the entire altar and everything on it was covered with a thin coat of wax, and cleanup was a stone bitch.

more below . . .

[onyxtwilight.livejournal.com]

Continued . . .

One year at PSG the druids did a workshop about cattle raids and why they took place -- because the cattle were the primary wealth of their various communities, it was explained. Then they instituted a game involving stuffed cows being stolen back and forth between campsites, but at some point someone decided that the true wealth of any campsite at that site was whether it had a picnic table or not. So then people started stealing picnic tables from one campsite to another under cover of darkness, or sometimes in the middle of the day, and it got so bad the organizers had to put a stop to it.

And here's one that only makes sense with some extra detail: at Heartland in '93, the theme was "Carnival" (in the European Mardi Gras sense) and they were trying to give a carnival/voodoo vibe to the main ritual; they had drafted Janet and Stewart Farrar to represent the God and Goddess, symbolizing that by crowning them king and queen of Carnival. They also had elaborate arrangements in the quarters, with dancers and pyrotechnics, including fires (central and quarters) that were rigged to dramatically self-ignite by remote control. So of course, two of the four quarter fires fail entirely to light, and have to be lit by hand, and then the ignition on the central fire sent sparking pyrotechnics skittering across the ground, coming awfully close to setting Stewart on fire in the process. So by the next day, the rumor mill had turned all that into "and then they crowned Janet and Stewart king and queen of the witches and tried to set them on fire as a ritual sacrifice." >:-)

(One other Janet-specific story from the Heartland two years prior: they did a workshop where the participants were split into the four tribes of the Tuatha de Danaan [some of the history was a bit loose, here], guarding the four treasures in the four cities, and the goal was to get the treasures all in one place -- but the tribes weren't allowed to talk to each other. One woman was appointed as Danu, who was allowed to pass messages (true and useful messages) between the tribes, and then Janet acted as The Morrigan (in a kinda-Elvira outfit), moving among the tribes passing false and manipulative messages. For "special effect," she did some weatherworking beforehand [and Stewart kept it up during], which was the most obvious example of real weatherworking I've ever seen [wind literally whipped around her body on cue, swirling up the dust at her feet], so that the impending storm would create a sense of urgency. Trouble was, she'd never poked at a weather system the size of the ones in middle America before [Ireland's are much smaller], and the wind got rather badly out of control, and did a lot of damage in merchant row -- though the successful resolution to the workshop problem also shifted the storm away before it broke (no, I am not kidding, it was impressive as hell and I've never seen anything like it since). And then she spent the rest of the summer apologizing, telling the story to all her other venues, and telling people why they should never try to affect the weather anywhere they don't actually live full time. >:-)

If I think of more I'll send them on. . .

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I hope somebody wrote an epic poem about the picnic table raids. That's just so beautiful!

See above regarding true story about mistaking ritual theater for real attempted human sacrifice.

I may need to scour the internet for tales of festival weatherworking gone awry. I know there are several B* standards, but since I wasn't present for any of them, I'd love to hear them again.

And of course, the Asatruar always want to yell "Hail Thor!" just at the moment when we're hoping the thunderstorm will veer away from us. Hail Thor! Have some mead! You're really awesome! And please refrain from trashing the campsite again!

[onyxtwilight.livejournal.com]

It is my understanding that it did, in fact, make it into the Henge of Keltria's book of modern myths and legends, cast in appropriate legendary language. (Steve Posch and the Babylon camp, one of the main players, ended up cast as invading Faeries from Underhill, if I recall correctly. >:-)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

How did you guess this story wants to be about invocation? I have collection of fire incidents, but more are always welcome. I hadn't planned on weatherworking, but a festival's temperament is so dictated by its weather, it will probably find a way in.

Memorial ritual for a beloved community figure who turned out not to be dead.

If I hadn't already written the funeral-comedy story for this series, I would totally use that. I would love to know who got to play the role of Tom Sawyer in this anecdote.

Portajohn employee who comes in to suck the contents out of the toilets loses control of his truck while rubbernecking at naked tits and puts the whole poop truck into the ditch. Which led to the rule that everyone had to put their clothes back on when the portajohn company came to do the toilets.

Ah, the classics never go out of style. Was it the same event that had the roof-repair guy distracted by naked people walk right off the roof? I seem to recall those stories traveled together by origin.

[onyxtwilight.livejournal.com]

The memorial was for Laughing Starheart, a radical faery type, artist and tattoo artist and singer, who used to be a staple at midwest gatherings back in the '90s. He had AIDS, and fell off the map at some point, and then a couple years later we heard he had died -- so we did a whole shrine for him at Samhain and people who only ever saw each other at festival showed up from three states away to toast his memory. And then later we found out he wasn't dead. Very weird, processing that one in reverse. I've no idea whether he is still alive, I haven't seen him nor heard tell of him for fifteen years or so at this point.

My portajohn story was from PSG, back when it was happening in Wisconsin. Apparently portajohn employees everywhere really like boobies. :-)

[onyxtwilight.livejournal.com]

Oh, what's a festival without an out-of-control possession? (And with the Fey, it sometimes seems like there's rarely any other kind, doesn't it?) Sebastian would be all over that shit. >:-)