Riverfest and Night Tours!

Hey all...welcome back from the weekend--I hope it was restful for everyone! We, the basement trolls of Middle College here at Beloit have begun the notorious, practically legendary Viewbook Mailing (dramatic drumroll) today, which involves stuffing giant envelopes with giant materials. It makes me feel like I'm shrinking or something because everything we're working with is about twice as big as a normal mailing. But, on to the important stuff...like...

Riverfest! As a child of small-town Iowa, I grew up going to town and county fairs in the summer: feasting on elephant ears and funnel cakes and everything-you-can-fry-up-and-put-on-a-stick, honing my bingo skills at the bingo tent, holding hands with middle school sweethearts on rusty carnival rides. Many of you surely know what I mean. But Beloit's Riverfest is a whole new level of carnivalesque fun--it's a heck of a lot bigger than Mt. Vernon's Heritage Days, for one thing...and Heritage Days, while always memorable, never hosts bands like Steppenwolf and Blue Oyster Cult AND Cheap Trick all in the same weekend. Remember my earlier post raving about the lineup for this year? Yeah, well, I actually made the effort to go as opposed to just sitting on campus listening to the not-so-far-off strains of "Don't Fear the Reaper"...and it was a blast. My sister, who's going to Vassar College in the fall came up for the weekend with her boyfriend, which was a ton of fun. I gave them and a few others a late-night tour of the campus on Saturday night, and just had an all-around great time. New Court Theatre, Beloit's summer stock semi-professional theatre company, has their show "The Foreigner" up right now (my boyfriend's in it! Whoo!) and it's pretty hilarious. So there's just a lot happening in Beloit right now, clearly. I wish I had pictures from Riverfest to post on here but the security guards actually emptied the batteries out of my sister's digital camera at the gate (she got them back later), so you'll just have to picture slightly aging rock stars with long hair and tight pants sounding not so bad here on the banks of the Rock River! I definitely got a much-needed dose of rockin' out, so now I can return to my non-groupie real life once again.

All right, back to the grindstone...

~ Laura DM