Amy: You think chemo was hard, try concessions!

Saturday was group practice at 6:30 a.m. so I got up at 5:30 and had coffee with Jo before we left for the park. Practice went great - only complaint was the sun was really beating down on us on our return mile. Next weekend I expect we'll be starting earlier, to avoid this.

Saturday night I was volunteering for the Kenney Chesney concert at a local stadium - a small group of us were working a concession stand as volunteers, with money earned going to the LLS, towards our fundraising goals. It was probably the most miserable thing I've ever done. I'd rather do another round of chemo than do that again.

I had to be there at 12:00 to park and check in, so there wasn't even time for a nap in between practice and going to the stadium - which was too bad because I knew it was going to be a late night. We were given a free meal which was a choice of a hot dog and pretzel or hot dog and nachos (not good fuel at all) then we trained and got set-up in our stand, and doors opened at 2:30. We were one of only two open stands on the entire level. Someone planned badly - I think they thought there wouldn't be much business on our level, for whatever reason. I don't know what the logic was, I just know we had 20-30 people in line for about 5 hours straight. There was no "down" time or "slow" time from about 3:00 until 10:00 pm. And people were mean. I had people get mad because it was an "all pour" event, which meant we had to pour all drinks into cups, including the bottled Gatorade and water. Also there were no lids for the drinks - it is a "no lid" policy. I guess people tend to throw them? This made people irate because they had to carry drinks and didn't want to spill them. Not to mention the rules about how many beers 1 person can buy, that one is always a crowd pleaser. Plus we were short-handed. We simply did not have enough people in our stand to really keep up with the demand so service was admittedly very slow, but we were doing our best!

We started out 3 ppl short to begin with because they didn't show at orientation (including Jo, but her son was sick and actually, I'm so glad she didn't make it because she would have hated Saturday!). During orientation there was 1 girl from another group who said that they had too many people and that she'd join our group and help us out, so we were thinking - Great! We're only down 2 ppl! But then she never showed up on Saturday. We were so slammed all night. They had to bring in an extra cook, and we even ran out of some of the food. That's how badly it was planned by the stadium people.

It was simply completely miserable. By the end of the night at 10:00 pm I'd had only Gatorade and water since my hot dog meal at 2:00, I felt like I was going to throw up or pass out, or both. My feet hurt so bad I could hardly walk. I ended up leaving a little before everyone else did because I truly felt ill, I had to sit down and put my head down because I thought I was going to be sick. Then I felt so bad about leaving the other girls to finish the clean up that I started crying, and then it was just that I was so overwhelmed by it all so I couldn't stop crying...

Before I left one girl told me she estimated we'd each earned something like $100-$150. I thought - That's it?!? I busted my @ss for that? So not worth it. I would pay someone $100 to not ever have to do that again.

Had it been simply a beer booth, which is what I was led to believe it would be when I signed up to do the gig, I think things would have been much better. But a full-on concession stand.... under poorly planned circumstances... I don't know what people were thinking, having just 2 booths open on an entire level. Never again.

I got home after 11:00 and just felt like crap. Sunday I was beyond exhausted - because remember I had done my training at 6:30 a.m. Saturday morning on top of the work at the stadium - so I pretty much slept in, watched TV and tried to nap. What a crappy gig. Anyone considering something like this - I do not recommend it!
-A