I spent a lot of time in Kin 1 on the weekend.
It was the BC Northern Exhibition and CFIS was broadcasting live from Kin 1 all four days. I took a couple of shifts on our table at the booth chatting with people and a few shifts on the air.
It’s a different experience, doing the voice-tracks live. If I voice-track a four-hour shift in the production room at the station, it takes me maybe 20 or 25 minutes.
At the BCNE, a three-hour voice-tracking session took, well, three hours.
Of course, I wasn’t on the air constantly, which was a good thing for the listeners, who I don’t think could possibly put up with hearing me for three or four hours straight.
No, in a regular hour I would do my first voice-track at about 10 after, talking about the songs that had just played and then talking some about the BCNE and all the different events going on.
Repeat that process about every 10 minutes until you get to 10 minutes to the hour. Now, I talk about the songs we just played, but I also mention the songs coming up before the top of the hour.
At that point, almost every hour, I would get up and go for a bit of a walk around Kin 1. It gave me a chance to stretch my legs, knowing I had a good 15 minutes until my next voice-track, and when you’re my age sitting in those little plastic chairs, your legs definitely need stretching on a regular basis.
Even just sitting at the booth, though, gave me the chance to indulge in one my favourite pastimes: people watching.
There were a lot of people passing through Kin 1 each day. Sometimes you would see the same person three or four times in a short period of time, as they looped through the aisles of vendors and passed our booth each time they reached the end of the row.
I saw people on their phones, a lot. One day I heard a young woman on her phone trying to figure out where her friend was. She took off in one direction, and a couple of minutes later, another young woman on HER phone came by, obviously trying to find the young woman who had been here just a few seconds earlier.
There were a lot of families, especially on Saturday and Sunday. Something more of them were using this year, which I had seen on occasion at previous fairs, was folding wagons to haul the little ones around in. Good idea, especially when those little legs tuckered out.
And by the way, I still have this horrible suspicion that on at least one occasion I referred to it as the “B.C. National Exhibition” instead of the “Northern Exhibition”.
However, since nobody came to our booth to accuse me of that, I’m hoping it didn’t actually happen and was just a product of my imagination.