The annual music festival that happens in my town kicks off this evening. It has been running for 30ish years and we have been attending it for the last nine or ten years.
It is relatively small as these big summer music festivals go and has always been quite family-friendly. We go with a bunch of friends, set up all of our beach umbrellas and chairs, and everyone comes and goes as they please. The one time one of my kids got lost at the festival a few years ago, he made his way to the EMT tent, gave them my cellphone number, and they called me to come get him. It’s just a super-chill event.
This year, the local promoter that has booked and run the festival since its early years has sold it to a regional promoter and now there are a bunch of new rules and other changes—no beach umbrellas, no chairs over thirty inches tall, reserved VIP areas in front of all the stages.
I am doing my best to stay positive about the whole thing, but it is super-easy to decide that all of these changes mean it is going to suck. “It didn’t used to be like this! It used to be cool and then they sold out and now it sucks!” Already, the town Facebook groups are filling up with this kind of stuff.
So, whatever.
I don’t know—I just want to go and have fun? Maybe some of the changes will, in fact, suck, but maybe they’ll just be different. Everything changes and if it didn’t, I think that would kind of suck, too, in its own way.
My plan is to go, to drink some beers, enjoy some music, and hang out with friends, and not get too wrapped up in how things used to be or why they couldn’t stay that way forever. I guess we’ll see how that goes.