The plan for the last year was to set up a tent at the first-ever outdoor Triffid Ranch show, and that plan also involved setting up at the Garland Urban Flea in downtown Garland, Texas. Part of the reason was because it was just down the road from the gallery, and part was because the Garland downtown with which I had been familiar in the early 1990s had changed beyond recognition. The roads were paved, the shops revived, and the central park had just finished a much-needed and very much appreciated renovation. Combine that with decent rents for vintage stores and unique restaurants, and every event in the park found an enthusiastic audience. The Garland Urban Flea was just one event, scheduled on the second Saturday of every month, but it seemed to be a perfect one with which to try conducting an outdoor show.
Anybody regularly attending or vending at outdoor shows will tell you that the weather can go sideways very quickly, especially in Texas, and that was getting to be an ongoing joke with previous attempts to set up at the Garland Urban Flea. First time: pouring rain. The next time, the previous day’s temperatures promised a beautiful event, and then a cold front dropped temperatures to the edge of freezing, making too much of a risk to the plants. The next show that didn’t conflict with other events was in May, where the rain started up around 2 in the morning and didn’t let up until about the time the Urban Flea was expected to pack up. Oh, and the makeup rain day? Memorial Day Weekend, right after I’d scheduled another show. And so it goes.
As it turned out, everything worked out. The next Garland Urban Flea ran on June 8, and the weather was GLORIOUS. Slight breezes, sunny but cool enough that everyone wanted to get out and do something before the summer heat hit, and the tent location was directly under two live oak trees, which gave extra shade all day. Combine that with cool neighbors and curious and excited attendees, and it was a great debut at the Urban Flea. Even breakdown was easy. It may be a few months until the next time the tent goes up (the Garland Urban Flea doesn’t run in August because of the heat, and July and September are just a little too warm for the plants), but October and November are perfectly reasonable if the weather holds.
And why the emphasis on the weather? Well, despite having a tent with sides, there’s only so much rain that a typical pop-up tent can deflect, and that’s not counting winds that tend to turn show tents into parachutes. The very next day, the Dallas area was hit with a massive rainstorm with 70mph winds, which tore trees apart, ripped off roofs, and cut power for most of the city and surrounding suburbs for days. Had that storm hit 24 hours earlier, everything would have been a total loss: what the rain and wind wouldn’t have destroyed directly would have been smashed when a branch from one of those shading live oaks came down. And now you know why most Triffid Ranch shows are indoors.
