Super Saturday to thank decades of volunteers at special closing event

Published 8:00 am Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Volunteers are at the heart of so many organizations in this community, and nowhere is this truer than with Super Saturday, the Tryon area’s arts festival for children. 

This year, on March 17, the Children’s Theater Festival board, organizer of Super Saturday, will offer a huge thanks at the end of the day to many decades worth of volunteers who have helped the event happen.

Now in its 40th season, Super Saturday has meant closing off Melrose Avenue to traffic and bringing in world-class performers for generation after generation of area children.

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Many arts festivals put on this kind of event with a paid director and staff. Children’s Theater Festival is different — no one on the board is salaried, nor do any of the myriad of people who help out receive a penny for their services.

The services they perform: Ticket takers, ticket sellers, venue hosts, performer bookers, performer hosts, caterer bookers. tech engineers, signage updaters, press release writers, T-shirt counters, T-shirt sellers, food booth coordinators.

Someone also has to organize the parade, get the banners made, set up lights, take down lights, set up chairs, put away chairs, pick up the trash, get posters into store windows. You would believe the hours spent on emails and texts and phone calls. Then there’s lining up funding for all this, writing grants and asking for support. Last year’s program alone listed more than 75 volunteers, and there have been years where there were many more than that.

All this and more has been going on behind the Super Saturday scenes for the last 40 years. Many hundreds — more likely thousands — of people in total have had a hand in pulling off this event over the years.

Every last one of them has done it with love in their hearts for this special event, and generations of our community’s children have been much the richer for their efforts.

For this reason, Children’s Theater Festival wants to offer a great big “thank you” to all our decades of volunteers, too numerous to mention by name or track down by current address.

We invite all of you to the grand finale of this year’s Super Saturday: a concert on Melrose Avenue by Tryon’s own Woody Cowan and the band Project X.  Music and birthday cake start around 3:15 p.m., and continue until 5:30 p.m. 

Turner/Tennant Foundation Inc. is the presenting sponsor of Super Saturday. Funding for Super Saturday is also provided by the Mary Kessler Fund at the Polk County Community Foundation. 

The Mary Kessler Fund also is making this year’s volunteer celebration possible.

For more on the day’s events, see our website, tryonsupersaturday.com, and follow us on Facebook.

– Submitted byEllen Douglas