Car Show Fragility
We’re gearing up to begin our new season and I’m making the usual adjustment to our website. It’s our 13th season in our 14th year. We’re just going to call it our 14th season. I ultimately took a couple of months off from writing this blog, thinking I’d be picking right back up after a few weeks, but I had a lot of thinking to do about what we want from E@RTC and life got in the way.
There was an article that came out in the LA Times about the problems with car events such as Cars and Coffee, which we are unwilling to become. They are not organized like we are, so we’re not in the exact same category, but we could be if we’re not on our toes. I didn’t add a link to the story because it’s behind a pay wall. There is irony there if you ever read the LA times. You can find the story online somewhere.
It isn’t what can go wrong at just the event itself, it’s the behavior outside of the event that turns the public against these gatherings when they aren’t tightly managed. It’s why we ban people who behave badly anywhere around Redmond. You don’t just have to behave badly at the show to get banned.
We did previously refer to these drivers as “diaper babies” but then I got a lot of offended diaper babies who sent me drawings in crayon stating their displeasure that they were lumped into the same group. If you stop pooping your pants, that will also get you out of the same group, if you think about it. Our apologies to diaper babies everywhere. Even the Hot-Pocket eating basement dwellers get upset when I lump in these drivers. The only people who never get offended are the Fresnoans who kind of agree with me. Of course the mimes sound off as usual and send me blank sheets of paper.
Anyhow, first a huge thanks to everyone who didn’t behave badly this past season and upheld the spirit of the gathering. That’s about 99.97% of you. You make it all worth our time. It’s that last .03% that we all have to worry about. We can’t all become mature adults.
We do fear that at some point, someone will do something really dumb somewhere in Redmond and become the poster for village idiots everywhere. There just aren’t enough villages to go around so every city seems to have more than one. (It’s ironic that to be a good village idiot, you have to be too dumb to get a job as a village idiot.)
We’d love to see car events do well everywhere and we’ve always supported other car shows, but until they get as strict as we are about their event, we all get painted with the same paint gun. It’s the behavior of a tiny few that create all the problems. We have no sympathy for that guy who organized the street races down in Auburn. His self-absorbed behavior made it even more difficult for modded cars to get more respect than the dude who has to register every time he moves. That guy isn’t getting support from anyone.
We’re always thinking about how to make our event even safer, which is why we send traffic through town. There are also a lot more cameras that direction. As we plan this new season, we’re thinking about how we can continue to be terrific ambassadors for the community, but it requires all of us. If you’re new, please understand, just one slip-up and this could all be over, so help us keep it the model for all other shows. Meanwhile, I’ll keep working on our new season. Holy hell, 14!