3½ months until Danville’s 36th annual “Festival In The Park”, but a big fan favorite is not coming back.
Festival in the Park focusing on family fun
Before we start, we would like you to know that the 2010 Festival will be held May 14-16th (nice editing there, R&B). And contrary to what the Register & Bee’s event calendar says, it’s not being held at the defunct Ballou Park Four movie theater. We would ask you to check out the official Festival In The Park website, but it’s still stuck in 2009.
Well, after those lovely successes, let’s get to the meat of this story… or the lack of meat, actually. Gotta admit, I agree that the Pigs in the Park event had became very large, but dammit, “large” is good. “Large” gets your event in the news. If the Festival in the Park board voted to eliminate this event in the summer, the Festival board and the Pigs in the Park people along with the Parks & Recreation department should have been able to get things organized to keep it going.
I dunno… To be the founder and main organizer of Pigs in the Park, Bill McMann’s quote is more interesting for what it doesn’t say…
“Tough decisions had to be made for the good of the whole organization,” he said. “The Festival in the Park board chose to bid farewell to Pigs in the Park. There just wasn’t enough room to host the event and staff members were being utilized for more popular activities that met the needs of a larger group of participants.”
I’ll go to this year’s Festival in the Park even without the Pigs in the Park competition and most people will probably do the same. But it’s a shame that with the ample space that Ballou Park has (and the parts that weren’t being used… everything behind the concrete stage) that the Pigs in the Park event is no more.
The Festival In The Park has went down hill in the last few years. This will be the end. RIP
I had not been to the FITP for years but I did attend a few years back. I was disappointed in what I saw then. It was nothing like the Festival that I remembered from back in the 70’s. I did not have the luck to attend the Pigs In The Park but I never heard anything but positive things about it. I have seen this type of event on The Food Network and they always seem very successful and fun. It makes perfect sense to me that the “powers that be” in Danville would kill off anything that is too successful and fun. After all, you don’t want to fill up too much of the park as that will deprive the drug addicts and pushers a place to do their thing.