Over the past five years Golden Gate Faire has quickly become my pride and joy. Don’t get me wrong, I love Valhalla and the rest, but this is our first one that we did ourselves. We created it, didn’t take this one over from a failed attempt by someone else, it showed up on the city’s doorstep and said, “hey, mind if we borrow a part of your park for the weekend?”

Each year it’s grown, both in participation by vendors and performers as well as in the attendance through the gate. This year we had over 7,500 patrons. If you add in the 700+ performers each day plus the vendors and support staff, we had well of 10k people on the ground. It gets smoother each year, we figure out the best layout/footprint, and we scale it up a bit more each time.

All our tuning doesn’t always work out, and we go “ok, we’ll not do that again next year.” But overall this event is just a joy to see develop and come along. It’s become a part of San Francisco’s annual calendar of events, and the crowds are expecting to see it. Next year it’ll return to it’s normal dates of the last weekend of August (which will put it on the 29th and 30th of 2009). This year we had to move it back due to September 1st being a Monday, which would make the last weekend of Aug be Labor Day weekend which there’s so many other big events that weekend, we weren’t really interested in having those dates.

Next year we’ll start with two box offices, for four active ticket lines plus one for will-calls and overflow from the others. I’ll adjust the 1st leg of the serpentine to force a left turn at the garland booth. And we’ll extend the front of faire further forward to the East as the site continues to grow. Oh, and we’ll double the number of privvy’s ordered.

Anyway, to the team goes the kudos. I still believe I just play a figurehead, play with city officials and deal with paperwork (and the whining of vendors), but let’s be clear, he’s the folks who suffer just as much (if not more) along with me each year in putting it together:

• Co-Producer/Public Relations & Marketing / Guild Coordination: Marti Miernik
• Facilities & Operations Manager: Durelle Polleck
• Site Manager (& the other half of Durelle’s Brain): Perry Louie
• Volunteer Coordinator: James Dyer
• Security Coordinators: Gaven & Beaker

And here’s a few links to some postings:

• SFist: Rockin’ Out at the Renaissance Faire 
• SFCitizen: Golden Gate Renaissance Faire 2008 Goes Off Without a Hitch