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]

Oh, wait - this one's good:

A HP, well-known in the community for being deathly allergic to onions, walks across a field--a hundred yards away from but downwind of the outdoor kitchen (where they are chopping onions for the feast) and falls immediately onto the ground, clutching her throat and thrashing her limbs.

Standing in line for the meal, the man in front of you asks if you've read the latest book by Big Name Person -- you say no, you think of that author as an oathbreaker and scam artist -- and the man turns out to be the author.

The entire population of the festival is in a series of underground tunnels (the festival is happening in an old WWII army base) and during the reinactment of the Persephone story, an elderly woman has a heart attack. You are a mile from the nearest vehicle and 40 miles from the nearest hospital. There are no phones. And the gate to the festival site is a big metal one, which is closed and locked for the night.

Everyone makes little boats out of driftwood and flowers and then they put a candle on them, light them and set them out to sea on the outgoing tide -- the entire flotilla drifts about a hundred yards upshore to a wooden dock, which is immediately ignited.

A young woman decides it would be fun to take her dad's new seaplane to the event (the dad is out of town) -- she ties it to a buoy next to the dock and then next morning when she goes to show it off to the festival-goers, another boat had been tied up to the same buoy and through the night the impact of its slamming up against the floats of the seaplane has caused the seaplane to sink. The seaplane was not yet insured and was worth 1.5 million dollars.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

The wooden dock thing is pretty hilarious to read about; probably less so if you were there.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Standing in line for the meal, the man in front of you asks if you've read the latest book by Big Name Person -- you say no, you think of that author as an oathbreaker and scam artist -- and the man turns out to be the author.
Ouch! I've said Uncharitable Things about a Certain New Age Press in the presence of people who had published with it, but then, they all agree that said press has a tendency violate contract terms about royalties, even more than most publishers do. (And I bet you know the one I mean.)

Persephone in underground tunnels! That's so...authentically Eleusinian! That sounds like it would have been an amazing ritual, but it's hard to imagine getting back into the groove after a participant's heart attack. So, Mrs. Lincoln, aside from that, how was the play?

Ah, fire and water. Once upon a time, there was a coven that put floating candles in a backyard swimming pool. When they went indoors for feast (because what could go wrong with fire that's floating in a swimming pool?), the filter pump kicked on. The pool liner was made of some petroleum-based thing that could burn underwater. For some time afterwards, the pool repair company's voicemail greeting ended with, "Remember, only you can prevent swimming pool fires."