Post #89041 by Formikahini on Thu, Apr 29, 2004 9:08 PM

Ok, now! My memory is NOT short gang (re: Exotica having been in the summer). It's a teacher/parent/student thing: if you're in one of those groups, when school starts, summer is officially OVER! :( I was already back at school when I told my administrators I was "going to a wedding in Chicago that happen[s] to be taking place during another one of those tiki festivals"! How else could I ask for a Friday off, right in the first month of school?

The only reason I did Oasis last year, and took the Friday off, was because I was asked to perform Friday night, and the band put the airfare on a credit card. Otherwise, that's a helluva lot of my own money to spend to fly into Palm Springs on a Friday and then turn around and fly home on Sunday. The year before I flew in and out of LAX and went on to spend a week or two up and down the coast, because it was summer, dangit! (It's a couple of hundred $ more to fly to and from Palm Springs than LAX or Chicago.)(My school was very sweet to indulge my request for non-necessary time off in order to sing.)

Now, don't get me wrong, I LOVED my time this past summer in California and plan to do it again this summer (mid-July), and every day/night did feel like an "event" to me, thanks to the WONderful TC ohana from San Diego to San Francisco. But parties in Hoity-Toityland aren't exactly national/international events, the way are Oasis, Hukilau, and Exotica. (The various crawls are probably approaching them, though, in scope.) International Tiki Day, by definition, isn't a gathering in one place of the tribes either, but rather the opposite.

So I'll keep my vote/begging in the move-Oasis-to-another-weekend pile. Surely the Tropics wouldn't hate a big money weekend in June or July, instead! And dangit, it IS a dry heat! If you lived in Swampland, USA, you'd have no problem either with Palm Springs in the summer!!

TIKI: Now, more than ever

[ Edited by: Formikahini on 2004-04-29 21:11 ]