Hello, my darlings—

📖 Let me tell you a story.

Because like most truths in this industry, it’s easier to hear when it’s nestled inside a real moment.

Years ago, at a northeastern show I won’t name (but if you know, you know), I was in my third year of vending from a tent. That’s the magic number at most permanent parks—three years.  👀 After that, it’s time to build a shop or make your exit.

I’d been saving up for this build. Had plans. Had dreams. Had already picked out my potential location like a hopeful raccoon circling a trash can of opportunity.

🎪🧐Then the Vendor Coordinator—a man, naturally—came up with a clever little plan.

If he could talk me into taking over and rebuilding an existing booth (one built by a face painter who wasn’t planning to build anything new), he could kill two birds with one bureaucratic stone: get me into a structure and shuffle her somewhere else to build another one. Two new buildings on paper, when he was slated to only get one.

Everyone wins, right?

❌Except the face painter wasn’t ready. She hadn’t budgeted for a build. And she was panicking because, like many women in this industry, she’d been conditioned to say “yes” to authority even when her gut said “no.” I watched her twist herself into knots trying to be agreeable.

👉🏼And when the General Manager finally came to me asking why this “perfectly good plan” wasn’t moving forward, I took a breath and gave him the line that shifted the whole tone of the meeting:

“There’s an assumption being made here—that because both the face painter and I sleep with carpenters, we don’t pay for construction.”

Let me tell you, that sentence landed.🔥

The GM did a full-body flinch, probably checking his mental tapes to make sure he wasn’t the one who made the assumption. (He wasn’t.)

But he heard me.

And after that, the plan changed.

⚒️ Because here’s the thing: this industry still wrestles with covert patriarchy. Not the dramatic kind that shows up in lawsuits—but the kind that assumes women have help, that we’re not the money behind the build, or that “catering” is our default skill set until proven otherwise.

⭐ But I’ve built shops. I’ve built teams. I’ve built nine-figure businesses out of kitchens the size of a broom closet. And I’ve built a reputation in this industry by not letting assumptions stand unchallenged.

So no, a booth swap isn’t just a booth swap.

It’s a window into the power dynamics that still need naming.

💡 If you’re a festival owner, take a moment this week to look at the unspoken systems in your park:

• Who gets asked to build?
• Who gets asked to bake?
• And whose imagined budgets get quietly padded by assumptions no one says out loud?

Change starts with awareness. Let’s start there.
Until next time—