FronteraFest
I can remember Day One of the Gratitude Project back in 2020 started off with having to clean up dog pee from the carpet then somehow stepping in dog poo, getting it on my shirt, and on a manila folder that was on the kitchen counter which Emi thoughtfully disposed of for me. So it makes sense that my first post in this series is written on the night I’m prepping for my colonoscopy tomorrow morning.
I think I’ll start with a wonderful thing about Austin that is freshest in my mind, Frontera Fest. It’s a fer-sure iconic institution and a delight all around. (I can say that because I don’t run tech for the festival, five different shows every night for weeks, which must be a freakin’ bear!)
From the audience’s point of view, you get to see a smorgasbord of Austin talent and wackiness, and if whatever you’re watching at that moment isn’t riveting, something else will happen in 20 minutes or so.
From the performer’s perspective, you fork over a wee dab of cash and get a space, built-in promo, a tech crew, a tech, and up to 25 minutes onstage for at least one night. Not to mention Ken and Christi’s opening stand-up which has borne the test of time. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you get more than one night. I’ve heard tell if you go past 25 minutes and 30 seconds, they just turn the lights out on you, but that’s never happened to me and I’ve never seen it happen, so it could be urban legend.
You get to try out your stuff and see if it works and you get to see other folks doing the same.
A million years ago in 1997, I spent a month in the Gila wilderness writing about 150 pages of stuff I remembered from trips to South Georgia as a child. Somebody dared me to try it out at Frontera Fest and it turned into my one-woman show “Goin’ to Georgia” that I toured for years as part of the Touring Artist and Artist-in-Education programs of Texas Commission on the Arts. Gawd almighty, was that ever a hustle. I could no more do that now than run a marathon. I’d go into a town, develop a show in rehearsal during the day with the kids, script it at night, and at the end of the week, put up the kids’ show and then perform mine, and get out of town, sometimes having had my car rolled.
I kept a map of Texas tacked to the wall in my office at home with push pins on all the places I’d performed through the years of In the West, the CowPattys, and touring with TCA. Some of the garden spots included Eagle Pass, Silsbee, Crockett, Lufkin (twice), Texarkana, Grand Prairie, Laredo (twice), Canadian (twice), Euless, Hurst, Bedford (for some reason I was popular in Tarrant County) and Linden, Texas to name a few. But hey, I drove away with a check and a story or two, and I could say I was a working actress.
But most of those pins on that map got there thanks to the leg up I got at Frontera Fest putting “Goin’ to Georgia” in front of an audience. So many thanks and kudos to Ken Webster and Christi Moore and the many folks who have held down the fort there through the years and helped preserve a little bit of what’s left of the Weird in Austin. We appreciate you!
P.S. I would be remiss not to mention Vicky Boone, Annie Suite, and company who founded FronteraFest to start out with! Hats off. Your legacy lives on.
©2023 Joy Cunningham
