Thursday, September 06, 2007

Sunday, 9/2/07



Empty streets in downtown Fayetteville on Sunday morning.

Slow Day at the Art Festival

The show started out slow, built to almost fair and then fizzled out altogether. The main problem was: Nothing else was happening in downtown Fayetteville on a Sunday. All the banks, offices and associated businesses were closed. Folks had to make a special trip just to attend the art festival.

Tear Down: The show closed at 4 PM. It took us a little over three hours to tear down and load the van. (It usually does take us that long.) Jo and I were the last artists to leave the hall. (We usually are.) As with set up, Jo did the majority of the tearing down and packing up while I did most of the transporting and loading. When we can get the van closer, I usually have more time to help with tearing down.

Freight Elevators: In addition to the two regular passenger elevators we used to get between the lobby and parking garage, the Town Center building also has two huge freight elevators. How huge? Large enough that I could have used one of them to bring the entire loaded van up to the lobby -- could have, but the folks running the show didn't offer us that option. The freight elevators didn't go to the parking garage, but to a loading dock area instead, an area that provided very few places to park the van, especially on Friday. When we arrived, there was an 18-wheeler unloading at one of the docks and the whole area was fairly congested with normal workday activities. That's why we chose to use the parking garage and its elevators. There were more parking opportunities in the loading dock area on Sunday, but our only means of transport was a two-wheel dolly. If we'd had a larger platform dolly, we could have benefited from the extra space in the freight elevators, but since we didn't, the passenger elevators worked just fine.

Poor Paul: A potter friend of ours from Oklahoma had even more problems with having to use the elevators. He has problems with his equilibrium, problems that can throw his sense of balance completely out of whack if he rides on an elevator. Paul said it would take him a couple of hours to recover from one elevator trip up to the lobby -- recover enough balance to stand and walk unaided. Paul had to load his cart containing his fixtures/pots onto the elevator and then hustle to the front of the parking garage and up the stairs to the lobby level. He usually asked someone else making the trip to pull his cart off the elevator so it wouldn't keep taking up space riding up and down.

(Note: There are a few more photos taken in Fayetteville here if you want to have a look.)
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