Dabney and I had a long day at the Cooper Young Festival this year. Running Gag got a booth so we could market the group and possibly recruit some new members. Dabney and I got there about 6:30 and it took about ten minutes to get through all the traffic of other people setting up. Our space was in the parking lot of the Beauty Shop restaurant. It did not take long to set up the table and tent. We had stickers and cups to give away plus a sign up sheets to get email addresses. After that was probably the hardest part of the day. It was still a couple of more hours until people starting showing up, so we were just kind of stuck there waiting. They festival opened at 9 and people starting trickling in. At first it was mostly the other vendors tricking out what else was there and then other people starting coming in as well. At first we just had the cups and stickers and I think we made it a little too easy to overlook our booth. I had Amanda run me home when she got there and we added some items and made our booth more eye catching and it looked like this.
This gave the booth a little more zip and having the other Running Gag people provided some more energy. Once the other people got there Dabney and I walked around some and got something to eat. I find it interesting that is a lot vendors that works the festival every year. We bought a couple of things, got some food, and returned to the booth. Some of the other Memphis improvers came by and said hi. There was also other people that we knew that came by. Overall we also saw the wide variety of people that you see every year at the festival. This one young girl came by and kept playing that game where you stack cups and unstack them as fast as you can. She kept doing the same thing over and over. Then she had a friend and they were racing each other as to who could stack and unstack the cups faster. I was getting to the point where I was trying to figure out a nice way to tell her to move along, but she got bored and moved on. Maybe because of the obnoxious orange color or that I hate UT so much but it seems like I saw a lot of people wearing University of Tennessee gear. By 2:00 it had already been a long day, so soon after that Dabney and I left. Dustin, Amanda, and our new member Mike took over running the booth and tore it down at the end of the day. I think it was a very successful day, we got a lot of names and hopefully we have the start of the next phase of Running Gag.
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