Pies For The Masses...

So, here we are...just less than 24 hours from the kick off to Roots and Blues.  And can I just have a moment here where I say: WHAT THE HELL WERE WE THINKING?  Thanks.  I feel a little better now that I got that off my chest. In my mind, I really envisioned a beautiful PJP booth.  Imagine with me for a moment...a tranquil setting full of baby pies of all flavors, plenty of beautiful fall decor making our space inviting and lovely, beautifully done handwritten signs advertising our work, and clearly marked banners with the PJP logo large enough to be spotted from festival entrance.

And in reality, um...I feel like a mess.  Festivals are a great opportunity to share your product and your brand, but the truth is that until you've participated in a few, I suspicion the learning curve is steep.  If we survive the next few days, I'm going to create an "Oh, You Are Participating In Your First Festival" checklist in a PDF and make it available for download on our website.  I'm not sure what is going on the checklist just yet, but that is only because I haven't discovered all the stuff I've forgotten or am unaware of just yet.  Trust me, I bet the list is long.

I can only hope our baking schedule for tomorrow morning - 350 baby pies to go with us to our booth at 3 pm - is remotely on target.  Because we are in a baby pie tin crisis right now (a long story for another day), our tins are a bit larger than normal.  And today I realized that the difference, while small, made it a tight fit in our 2,000 newly purchased fully disposable and 100% recyclable plastic pie boxes.  AWESOME.

And you know the fall decor, beautifully lettered signs, and clearly marked banners?  Yep...didn't happen.  Because the reality is that running a fully functioning and busy shop and thinking about baking 2,000 pies or so sort of shoves the rest to the wayside.  I'm not saying that we might not pull off a last-minute miracle tomorrow before 3 pm, but it is likely I'll need to kill the Nora Ephron movie scene scenario I've got in my head before I make myself a little (more) crazy.

And beyond lackluster booth decor, I feel a little on edge because I don't have any idea how tomorrow or the weekend will play out.  And you may not know this about me, but I'm a girl who likes a managed outcome.  Ahem.  So this whole "if this, then that...and then if this, maybe that" planning process is making me a little short of breath and a wee bit stabby.  In case you couldn't tell.

At the height of one of my irrational panics over stickers this evening, one of my kids looked at me and said "hey, isn't this just all about getting pie to everyone that wants to buy one?".  Touche.  I think I'll focus on that - pies to the masses...pies for World Pie Domination.  I think even Nora Ephron would agree, don't you?