Most of my day on Friday was in some way spent working on the campaign. Around noon
I had to drive from north Pinellas down to District 5 to pick up all of the gear for the parade from Steve Lapinski and Linda Lucas. From there I had to run to Lowes and Staples to buy some gear, and make copies of the Roy Hunt flyer and volunteer signup sheets. After I got home I had to organize the shirts, prep the clipboards, round up some more gear, print out a handful of pictures, put together the display board and load my trunk. At about 10 pm I was finally able to focus my energy on something other than pride preparations and I must say I was glad to put that behind me for a few hours and relax.
6 am Saturday came way too soon because I was not able to sleep all that well the night before but I had to grin and bear it. With a venti carmel macchiato (with an extra shot of espresso for good measure) and a apple fritter in hand I made the long trip down to Saint Pete at 6:45. I was the first one there so I parked, found our location and checked out the rest of the festival until Mike and Carlos arrived. Then we began unloading the cars and trying to figure out the tent. The tent apparently is the kind that requires stakes to be put into the ground, whichobviously is not the sort of thing that is possible when setting up on the street, so we decided to amend “The 18 commandments of effective organizing” to include: “Always have Duct Tape”. Luckily, Mike always has Duct Tape and we had lovely neighbors to our right who allowed us to Duct Tape our tent to theirs. Unfortunately, we had no neighbors to the left so we had to improvise a little more on that side. We ended up taping the tent to one of our tables then stacking cases of water bottles in such
a way that it kept enough weight down on the table so that it wouldn’t fly away.
After we got the tent situated and everything within organized, rain and wind proofed it was time to get ready to march. Much to my dismay, Christine and I (the booth anchors) were sent to march while Katie and Theresa (the marchers) got to sit back at the booth. Now, the main reason this irritated me was that I have asthma and no health insurance and thus no inhaler so I try to stay away from situations where I exert myself without an exit plan. Along the parade route there were no cold quiet rooms or paper bags to train my breaths. The other reason that it annoyed me was that Katie and Theresa have not done much of anything to help plan the parade,
except for Theresa’s shopping at costco for water. They never replied to emails I sent out, sat down for the meeting I wanted to have with us all AND they always leave early or don’t show up to events and meetings. I am however, glad that I ended up marching, it was a slow enough speed andrather short so I did not end up having much of a problem with my asthma and it was great to see the reactions of the people in the crowd. There was quite a few people out there who recognized the Kornell name from events or mailings and were excited about seeing us in the parade. I also
got to snap a lot of great group photos after the march.
The rest of the day was spent walking around the festival, talking to attendees and
businesses while handing out flyers and invites to the Roy Hunt event. I think we did fairly well collecting well over 50 new email addresses and phone numbers for our volunteer list as well as getting some donations. Most of the donations that day were small cash amounts but I think we will be getting some bigger amounts from the website from some of the folks that we met today. I don’t think we got anywhere near our goal of $3,000 but we will just have to make due with what we have, and earn more money after the cutoff on Monday.
