NERFA Ripton Community Coffee House Showcase 2005

The Ripton Community Coffee House Guerilla Showcase

Northeast Regional Folk Alliance – November 11-13, 2005

The Ripton Community Coffee House held a guerilla showcase at the 11th Annual Northeast Regional Folk Alliance Conference in Monticello, NY. This was the second year we have done a showcase. Friday and Saturday night the conference has official showcases after dinner, followed by the Tricentric showcases (three stages at once) that run until about 11:30 PM. Then different organizations and people present guerilla showcases in the hotel rooms. These can run until 3:00 AM or so.

We did a showcase on Friday night. This year our showcase featured a number of great performers who have played (or will be playing soon) at our coffeehouse. The lineup went: Midnight - Rik Palieri; 12:20 AM - Patrick Fitzsimmons; 12:40 AM - Iain Campbell Smith; 1:00 AM - Anais Mitchell; 1:20 AM - Gina Forsyth; 1:40 AM - Richard Ruane and Beth Duquette; 2:00 AM - Rebecca Hall and Ken Anderson; 2:20 AM - Will Danforth.

If you have never heard of these conferences before, they are excuses for acoustic music presenters and performers to get together, attend workshops, play or listen to music and hang out with friends that they only ever seem to see at gatherings like these or at various folk festivals.

If you want to learn more about these sorts of things, visit the Northeast Regional Folk Alliance web site or the parent Folk Alliance organization web site.

We had support from several Vermont businesses for our showcase. Paul Ralston's Vermont Coffee Company again donated all the coffee for our showcase. We kept a couple airpots full of coffee going in the hallway outside our room throughout the weekend. This is very important considering that people stay up listening or playing music until five or six in the morning, then get up between nine and ten the following morning for even more important fun.

Magic Hat Brewery provided support. Vermont Soap Organics donated freebie soaps, which was very popular for all the hotel staying public.

Next year we plan to make it even better. Here are some pictures of what it looked like.