We Are Just…
…a little over three weeks before we sheepishly, and with deep remorse, tell you we’re rained out. Actually, it’s been nice about one in six or eight times on our Opening Day, so you never know, it could be glorious. That’s still better than your dating average. As you know, we call it on the Thursday before the Saturday, and so we won’t make that call on whether we’re rained out or not until April 3 at 3 PM.
Also note, for Opening Day, we will call it rained out even if the chance of rain is less than 30%. The first Opening Day has to be a perfect day, or the whole season gets influenced negatively. There is a psychological effect to all this if it’s a marginal day, like you just watched someone pee in the pool. A great opener results in a great season. You all know, if you go to a party that sucks eggs, you won’t want to go back even if they had really good little weenies on a stick. A bad opener would be like a birthday party at Taco Bell or slow driving through Fresno.
As we get every spring, we’re getting a lot of questions about criteria via email. Yet, even with the criteria page answering all their questions up, down, and sideways, people still write us to clarify that we don’t really mean what we define or because their car is one of 10,000 painted in mauve, and that should make a difference. If you have to explain that to people who see your car, it’s probably not a selling point.
We have some who send us their list of mods, and that doesn’t do it either. We spell it out every way we can to make it so clear, Windex corporate would hug us. Yet some don’t think it’s enough. We’re not out to be rude, and we do all we can to be helpful and nice, but we now just send those people right back to the criteria page, knowing the answer is right there.
We do love it when you point out something where we could improve the criteria page for clarity, and we spend a lot of time refining it each season to keep it fresher than early morning produce at Pike Place, but some still get their undies in a bunch over us not bending the criteria just for them.
The reality of it all is that you are the ones who hold E@RTC’s brand’s value, not us. We’re just the facilitators who reflect it right back at you to create the best free exotic and rare car show in the US. If we’re off, even a tiny bit, you sure tell us in a hurry, and we appreciate the feedback as long as you keep our moms out of it. We just want you to show up delighted by what you see at the show every Saturday. Remember, we’re not asking for a kidney.
All winter long, we’ve been hearing from people who are sharing with us what they plan to bring this year, and some of it is coming from a long way away. It’s all stuff you really want to see, so this will be a year of amazing surprises. As word got out that we’re a big deal, more and more cars make the effort to get here, and we’re excited about that. Let’s hope Opening Day holds up!