On Being Wrong

This is the thing I thought I was going to write about yesterday. I ended up going off on the fragrance-free seating tangent becasue it was in worship that I was thinking about this, and it's related to why I was willing to join with my meeting in the fragrance-free seating experiment. It's about a thing that happened a long time ago.

I used to work security at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. The last year I worked, right before I got pregnant with Eric, I was an Assistant Coordinator, responsible for supervising a crew of about 8 women. There were three ACs, and two coordinators.

For years, women coming onto the land without paying had been a serious problem. One year I was told by one of the women who worked in the festival office that they estimated that maybe as many as 1 in 4 or 5 women on the land that year had come in without paying, based on things like how many dinners they were serving compared to ticket sales. But it was hard to keep women from doing it; there's hardly anything easier than strolling in through the woods.

Many women came in free by hiding in the back of friends' pickup trucks or RVs. When we arrived the week before the festival to start setting up security stations and training crew, we were told that the festival office had decided that we would now search every pickup truck and RV for hidden women as they came in the front gate. This had been decided after advance materials had been printed and after women had bought their tickets, and the five of us on the security coordinating team thought it was a terrible idea. We were sure that women who pulled up to the gate and heard for the first time there that their vehicles would be searched were going to be resistant, angry, and belligerant. We thought the festival was putting too much of a burden on us and our crews. This, we were sure, was going to be a disaster.

I don't remember whether this had already been planned, or was in response to our protests, but the organizers put together a small super-crew of women who had worked at the festival for a long time, mostly women from the office, who would be at the front gate on opening day and whose job it was to deal with all these RV and pickup truck drivers who were going to be so pissed off.

Except it never happened. With one or two exceptions (who turned out to be women with a clown-car's worth of friends stuffed into the RV's bathroom), women were happy to let the crew take a look in their vehicles. They were shocked and angry to learn that free-riding was such a problem. They were happy to do their part to keep it in check.

It's kind of a side note, but after the first couple of hours, we never found hidden women. Word had percolated back down the line of cars waiting to get in, and the free-riders cut the fence and walked in instead. But that is not germane to our story. What is germane to our story is that I was also working the front gate on opening day (I ended up having a brief, intense, and ill-fated fling with one of the women from the super-crew, in fact. Which is also not germane to the story but I like to mention it once in awhile because I like to crack the boring knit-pants-wearing suburban mom facade and remember how daring I used to be).

OK, so I was working the front gate on opening day, and in between flriting with Mocha, I noticed that my prediction about how the car-searching would go had been completely wrong. There were no protests. There were no shouting matches. There was no drama (until a few nights later when Mocha went off the deep end. "Why are you functionally monogamous these days, Su?" "Because the last woman I had a thing-on-the-side with was a psycho, thanks for asking.")

This was a life-changing thing. Not the bad fling with Mocha, but the realization that all my predictions about what was going to happen when we asked to search vehicles had been wrong. I had been really worked up about this, and I wasn't the only one. We thought it was going to be a trainwreck; instead it was the usual opening-day carnival, the blue sky, the sun beating down, the women already on the land calling, "Welcome home!" to the women arriving, the family-reunion atmosphere. There were so few problems that the woman who had been specially dispatched to deal with the trouble-makers was able to spend much of her afternoon flirting with me instead.

Anyway, this has stayed with me for going on eleven years now. Many times when a group is trying to make a decision and I think we're heading in the wrong direction, especially if I catch myself thinking of all the ways it is sure to go bad, I remind myself of that August afternoon at Michigan, and I consider the possiblity that I could, once again, be completely, absolutely, one-hundred-percent wrong.