1. FloydFest Vest 2. Where’s Waldo? 3. Is it live or is it Memorex? 4. Predicting the best yet FloydFest 5. Bowled over 6. Yielding to gravity (AKA Floydfest rest) 7. Look what found its way center stage during a “Railroad Earth” set. 8. Look closer. This is what it’s all about. (Read more on […]
At first it seemed that my husband Joe had fallen under the seduction of a mistress. Since he took on the task of coordinating on-site parking for FloydFest ‘07, I hadn’t seen him in days. For the past five years, he’s volunteered his time in exchange for a weekend pass, but this year, as the […]
Seems you can go anywhere on the grounds of FloydFest with a sparkly pink performer’s wrist band, even to the hospitality tent for a complimentary beer on tap. And if your husband is organizing the parking at the festival you’re likely to get a decent parking place and maybe a ride in a golf cart. […]
At the first annual Floyd Fandango, an autumnal beer tasting carnivale hosted by the founders of Floyd Fest, my husband and I saw a clown balance a wheelbarrow on his head while juggling sticks. We got advice from a talking crystal ball, rode on a Ferris wheel, drank mead, and ate handmade potato chips. Unfortunately, […]
Many of the best moments in my life have happened spontaneously. Last weekend at Floyd Fest was no different. Julie Hauserman, a Florida-based journalist and radio personality (pictured here), happened to be camping across the path from the Floyd Fest Poet Tree, a volunteer soap box stage for spoken word readings, located under an apple […]
The arts and homespun wares featured at Floyd Fest this year included handmade hammocks, pottery, jewelry, stained glass, leather goods, clothes, birdhouses, and hula hoops. There was even a booth with a cider press selling freshly made apple cider. Although I enjoyed window shopping and sampling Floyd Fest’s creative bounty, I believe it was my […]
1.Jack in the hat. Jack (on the left) is a member of the meditation satsang I belong to. Here, he and his friends in various hats are volunteering at the Jacksonville Center information booth. 2. Is it any wonder that I lost my parked car and almost missed my scheduled reading under the Poet Tree? […]
Floyd Fest, our town’s yearly world music festival, is a people watchers paradise. My favorite part of the weekend festival – just six miles from my driveway on The Blue Ridge Parkway – is the cross section of people who attend it. Once on the sprawling grounds of open fields and wooded pathways, roles and […]
Floyd Fest is different this year. There is no mud. No rain or fog. No hurricane skirted the site, as it has in the past, and festival goers have had to drop the nickname “Fog Fest,” because there is none. The crowds are noticeably larger. Is that why I lost my parked car and almost […]
Welcome in the word… Have you heard? Mara Robbins Small squares of laminated words from favorite poems hung from the poet tree like holiday ornaments. Under them, and situated between two nearby stages, the poets read whenever there was a break in the music performance line-up during the 3 day world music festival (Floyd Fest). […]
AKA: Colleen on the Soap Box ~ It’s always a challenge to choose which poems to read at a spoken word performance. The poems should be varied but flow well together. My friend Mara began her last reading at the Blacksburg London Underground Pub with an offering of “something borrowed, something blue, something old, and […]
It has become clear to me that one of the most deep-rooted causes of our problems is the way we treat children and above all babies. I am equally convinced that no program of social and political change that does not include and begin with changes in the ways in which we bear and rear […]
