theBarnstorming

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March 07, 2007

Snowy Philly

We woke this morning to snow, something which usually pleases me to no end but which is not a positive development on the Flower Show front. The people who tend to populate the Flower Show are the same type of people who do not like snow and the attending inconvenience. And so snowy days are slow and unproductive. We stand around a lot. We don't sell much. We notice the passage of time like a painful drip in a Chinese prison. The slow day did afford two opportunities: 1) I was able to enjoy the beef brisket sandwich from the market adjacent to the convention center. The non-snow-day lines have been prohibitive and so I have been eating from the salad bar four days straight. Today I breezed to the front of the queue and ordered my sandwich with little competition. It was delicious. 2) I was able to wander the aisles a bit taking pictures for Brian. And for all of you.

First, the snow.

And a banner I should have photographed and posted here days ago. By way of introduction. Here is the grand hall where the many people gather in throngs.

You know Seiko and Bob and Robbi and Maiko and me. You even know Wild Bill. But the Flower Show crowds call for extraordinary measures, reinforcements.

Meet Midori, one of Sieko's friends from the Philadelphia Ikebana chapter. She is an arranger from the Ohara school. And a wonderful, kind person.

And Ronnie, another Ikebana friend of Seiko's. She makes flower arrangements in the various pots around the booth. The arrangements make the booth look nice and show off the potential of the various containers we sell. Invariably the arrangements do their work. And somewhat too well. Invariably, our customers want to buy the containers with Ronnie's arrangements, even if a nearly identical one is sitting right next to it. The power of suggestion is strong. And so we do a lot of shuffling of Ronnie's arrangements.

Here's Ronnie. In a few weeks, she is moving to Dubai.

Until today, the show has been going well. In fact, we are starting to run out of certain items. Whether this is because we've sold more than usual or because we brought fewer, we are not entirely sure. Inventory management is a staggering challenge. In any case, since the opportunity might soon be gone, here is a tour of the booth and some of our more popular items.

Like the African Knobs:

Ok, admittedly the knobs are not among our top sellers. In fact, I really just like the name. The knobs fall under the category of interesting dried plant material for arrangements. One need only soak the African Knob in water for a few hours to restore flexibilty. At which point a branch of the knob might be shaped according to one's liking.

These round pots are made by a guy named Richard who lives in Maine. Each one has a small hole hovering above a small piece of kenzan so that one can position a flower or two. They run 18-28 bucks and are a very popular item.

And (here's a name for you), the Badash crystal, a nice combination of Jade glass and brushed steel.
Badash is imported from Poland. Very popular.

Angela Fina is a potter from Amherst, MA. She's a pretty well-known ceramicist and has been featured on the cover of Ceramics Monthly. We have been selling her stuff for a long time and sell a lot of it.

Another big seller: pieces of slates with a hole drilled through attached to a pot containing a bit of kenzan. It's the same idea as Richard's pots.

More on our booth to come. For now, let's take a tour of some other Flower Show oddness.

The dolphins, for example.

$12,000 each. Cheap!

And cacti. Which means more than one.

Artwork made entirely of real pressed flowers. They are spectacular.

Strange, squiggly blown glass things.

This booth is for a company that does stone patios. In order to demonstrate their wares, they built an entire stone patio on the convention floor. It must weigh tons. And yet...

Along similar lines, the folks who sell sheds saw fit to assemble various models in their entirety. I thought setting up our booth was pretty complex.

And a booth that specializes in deer deterrents.The little guy looks scared, doesn't he?

The show ends at 9:30 each night. Which means at 9:30 we start restocking the booth, filling its shelves and nooks and restoring the lost abundance.

One of my jobs tonight was replacing the bubble wrap. We use a lot of it, considering the large number of pots, vases, and other breakables we sell.

I feel that on a good night I would be able to parlay the picture of me hoisting an enormous roll of bubble wrap over my head into a good joke. Into some sort of humorous, yet resonant comment. One that might raise a chuckle, yet offer a culminating poignance, suggestive of the underlying human urges that move us all. That make things like the Philadelphia Flower show a yearly happening.

But I'm just too tired for that sort of thing tonight. And so I'll end with a picture of my dog. Whom I miss like the dickens.

Posted by bogenamp at March 7, 2007 11:42 PM

Comments

Posted by: ming at March 13, 2007 06:51 PM