Observations from the Woodshop

Can Two Country Boys Make It In the Big City?

Well, at this juncture the answer is apparently not. Here’s the long and the short of it. I received a call asking if I would be interested in doing a furniture and furnishings show in Baltimore, by a promoter that I have done shows with in the past. Seemed like a good idea at the time. I had new product I wanted to show, [my "Meander collection"], I have friends I could stay with in Baltimore, and save a hotel bill, and I was able to talk my friend Jeff Fetty, [ a renowned blacksmith ] into doing the show with me, and sharing the cost. Sounds good. Let’s do it. Problem #1, I had forgotten how much work these things are. First there’s all the planning. What to show, how to lay out the exhibit etc. Then we had to build work to exhibit at the show. That ended up being weeks of work and thousands of dollars in expense.  Then we had to get there. My work in a borrowed trailer that I had to modify my truck to be able to have lights so that I could pull it 2 hours to Jeff’s shop so that we could then transfer the trailer to Jeff’s van for the trip to Baltimore.  We left a day ahead so that we could be at the show early to set up our booth. So to recap, we left on Thursday, to be there early on Friday to set up for a Saturday, Sunday show.  So we get to the show and it is something like seven steps up into the building from the street. Did I mention that Jeff and I are both on the backside of 50? My furniture is heavy. His stuff is made out of iron and steel. We got there at 9:00 am and were finally set up at 6:30 that evening. Let me tell you we were a couple of tired old farts by then. Then we had to figure out what to do with our van and trailer which nobody in downtown Baltimore seemed interested in helping us find a place to park for the weekend. So it was off to the suburbs and my friends house, hoping we could find a place to leave it there. But our display looked great and we had a great dinner at my friends and started the next day off with high hopes of a successful weekend.
      What if you give a party and no one comes? The show was painful. Attendence was abysmal. There were so few people in attendence that if we saw someone in the vicinity of our booth, that wasn’t wearing an exhibitors badge, we were practically going out a dragging them in. I started feeling sorry for them. I mean it’s one thing to not do a lot of selling but it’s really painful to not have anyone to even show your work to.  So then, after a completely miserable show, we still had to tear down our booth and load everything back up for the trip home. Being the two old farts that we are at this point, we were the last ones down and out of there, and we were exhausted. We got about an hour down the road, and got some food and a motel for the night, hoping that things would at least look brighter tomorrow as we had home to look forward to.
         Things were going just fine the next day until, going up a mountain outside of Morgantown West Virginia, the transmission on Jeff’s van decided that it had had enough.  We were in the slow truck lane, which was good, as we had completely lost any form of movement other than the possibility of rolling backwards down the mountain. It was pouring rain, and there was not even a shoulder to pull off onto, even if we had been able to.  Luckily, a wrecker spotted us and was able to get to us before we were demolished by any truckers unable to avoid us, and for a tidy sum, hauled us part way to Jeff’s shop, where we stopped and waited for a buddy of Jeff’s to come get us while we enjoyed the worst lunch of Mexican food either of us have ever had. 
       So, I did finally make it back. The show itself consumed five days of my life, that I will never get back. I hadn’t done any shows in almost five years. I hate to think that this one may have been my last?