A line cook in a busy restaurant runs something like three hundred services a year. Three hundred times, the tickets come in, the pressure builds, something goes wrong, and they find out within minutes whether their fix worked. By the end of year one, they've had more reps than most festival producers get in a decade. Because here's the thing nobody tells you when you start in…
Read MoreOne fall afternoon, in a meeting that should have been routine, I watched a newer director go quiet. I knew the look. They had an idea. A good one, probably. The kind that turns a flat revving engine into something that purrs and pours. And across the table sat people who had been around the production bends. People who had tackled a host of challenges before this director ever walked into the building. Those stripes are…
Read MoreAt the end of June, I knew I needed to disappear. Not forever. Just long enough to hear myself think again. But I couldn't go yet. And if you produce anything for a living, you already know why…
Read MoreIt is closing night. The headliner is twenty minutes from walking out. The field that started this morning as a thousand separate people has become one body leaning toward the stage, and you can feel the air change before a single note plays. You have felt that shift before. The moment a…
Read MoreYou ran the team debrief. You sat in the room while the department heads walked through what held and what broke. You captured the near-misses. You wrote down the protocols worth keeping. You did the organizational work, and you did it well. There's one debrief you didn't run.The one where you're the only person in the…
Read MoreThirty-six seasons is a long time to do anything. It is long enough to see every kind of festival leader succeed and fail. Long enough to watch brilliant operators burn out in…
Read MoreYou have been doing this long enough to know that the hardest festivals to lead are never the ones where the stage collapses. They are the ones where you do. Not visibly. Not in front of anyone. But somewhere in the…
Read MoreYou approved the $40,000 staging upgrade without a second thought. You signed the lighting package. You didn't blink at the hospitality rider that costs more than some people's annual salary. But when it came time to invest in yourself - - in your own development as the person who makes every…
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