Sweet Nana's booth

Last weekend, my husband and I tried to spend the labor-day weekend productively at a very large festival in Marshall County, Ind. Next to the Covered Bridge Festival -- whose size and visitor impact everyone around here knows about -- the Marshall County Blueberry Festival is possibly the biggest in Indiana. It's a four-day event with upward of 70,000 people walking through arts and craft booths, listening to entertainment, watching fireworks, and generally gorging themselves on any variety of 'fair food' one could possibly imagine at a hundred booths, trailers and tents.

It's a very well run festival that pretty much occupies the small farming town of Plymouth, Indiana, and the committee that operates it is a well oiled machine with excellent traffic control, great parking facilities and lots of local color and specialties like Honey-Buttered Corn on the cob and the best blueberry donuts anywhere. They make visitors feel welcome and appreciated and they provide a few extra-nice touches for arts and craft vendors. We were impressed with the organization and work.

We were less impressed with someone's choice of offerings for Friday night's entertainment.

We were minding our business in our little craft booth on Friday night when four or five gators and golf-carts showed up hauling big guys with guns and yellow t-shirts saying "Police" in six inch silk-screened letters across their backs. Slowly and with a lot of milling around, these guys began to take issue with the booth next to ours and the booth two down -- both of which were offering fantastic deals on Coach and Prada purses.

The next thing we knew, they had several people handcuffed and sitting on a picnic table nearby while they began tearing through bags. Over the next hour or so, they proceeded to haul the handcuffed people out and tear down and haul away the entire booth two down from us. Our neighbor's booth they left up, but carried off all the purses as well as her.

While all this was happening, of course, the other 69.990 visitors we had hoped to sell a few things to avoided our booth like the dust that thickly covered the ground was radioactive fallout. In short, we spoke to almost no one (except police and festival officials) and sold nothing at all.

We later found out from a festival official that the booth they hauled away was only one of ten such booths; and that ISP brought in a bus to carry all the arrested people "downtown," and that the people arrested were part of a long-time ISP investigation of counterfeit purses and bags and that they -- the State Police -- had chosen the time and place. We also discovered they brought in a Haz met team looking for meth and found cocaine on one of the men arrested.

Unfortunately, all of that night's commotion and lack of business set the tone for the entire weekend.

Two of our neighbors moved away -- one that night in tears and one the next day just because they were doing so badly. The neighbor, whose booth the police left up because she was not part of the "gang" was released on bond (none of the rest were) and was back Saturday morning selling sunglasses and imitation perfume -- but no purses.

We had some great chats with her over the next couple of days where we got several different versions of the history behind the purses and the booth.

Did she know that the bags were illegal? Yes, she did, she said. But she also said that they didn't really belong to her but to the friend that was there on Friday night and happened to be gone when the gators showed up.

In the end, the 70.000 shoppers continued to avoid the area of our now isolated booth and we did not meet our expectations for the festival. But we did learn some valuable lessons I'd like to pass along to the readers.

What we learned:

1. As in all commercial pursuits, location, location and location are the three most important considerations of any business; and

2. As in all other life endeavors, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, even at the second largest festival in Indiana; and

3. If you see a deal on a terrific little brown Coach bag that's just what you've been looking for at less than half the price, snap it up it right away because it may not be there "later."