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

[karenjunker.livejournal.com]

The festival organizers provide 2 Sani-cans for the entire 4-day, 300 person event. By the end of day one, they are overflowing.

A 6 y.o. child gets bitten by a spider, has an allergic reaction and everyone is so stoned, no one can drive him to a hospital, so they give him Benadryl and hope for the best.

The next year, the same child uses the palm of his hand to push down the cover of a metal & glass candle lantern and the part he pushes is the top, where all the heat had risen from the flame -- again too stoned to drive, so ice and again hoping for the best.

A big windstorm, so all power to the site is cut off in the middle of cooking for the feast. Food served anyhow. Many cases of food poisoning.

Organizer's dad dies at the event, from natural causes. On her birthday.

Big Name Person decides that someone is sleeping with her husband behind her back -- organizes search parties that scour the snake-infested 1000 acres of the site all night and into the dawn.

I have many more.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Festival organizers' outside-of-festival lives do seem to wait to explode until the festival's up and running.

I have so many weather-related mishap tales... Lots of tents are designed now so they can be put up without being staked, and every year we see the occasional ambitious tent try to fulfill its dreams of becoming a kite.

Everybody was too stoned? Is my regular festival the tamest festival on the circuit, or is it that times have changed, or is it an East Coast/West Coast thing?