I thought I'd start an item about the cancellation of most of the Michigan Festival. A few pieces of the festival are surviving this year: the Folklife Festival, which I believe to be mostly funded by MSU, is continuing on campus. And the city of East Lansing kicked in a few thousand dollars to save a series of small concerts downtown.5 responses total.
I found the following on Usenet from a local MSU poster. This is part of the small-concert series which the City salvaged. >If you can come out to East Lansing, Michigan on Wednesday, Aug. 12, you >can see Gaelic Storm, the band that performed in Titanic, for free, from >8-10 pm behind the Tower Records store
What was the Michigan Festival?
scg has the correct question, so it's his turn! Oh wait, this isn't the Jeopardy item. The Michigan Festival was a big ten-day affair held in East Lansing in late summer. It began in 1987 as a celebration of Michigan's 150th anniversary as a state. The big budget, big draw item was a series of concerts held in MSU fields, which drew up to 20,000 people. There was also a Festival of Michigan Folklife; in its first year this was a recreation of the exhibit which Michigan had sent to the national folklife exhibition at the Smithsonian. There were also some smaller stages with local jazz and folk bands. Over the years the big evening concerts seemed to be soaking up everything, and the booking, for my tastes, got less and less interesting. If I remember correctly, the festival lost money last year, and they responded by cutting the 1998 series from 10 shows to 5. The height of this year's artistic excitement was the booking of Kansas. (*ahem*) Button sales collapsed.
And, to put the final period on the story, the Michigan Festival organization has filed for bankruptcy. It is hard to imagine that there will be any further festivals.
Get them out of the way, and maybe someone else will do it right again.
You have several choices: