Welcome to CityFest, our annual celebration of the art, music, and fried foods that make this city great! After last year’s Covid hiatus we’re thrilled to announce CityFest will return in person this fall.
No, our Covid numbers aren’t any lower than last year. But the community needs this festival, and we need this community. We especially need the money this community spends on parking, downtown dining, and festive souvenir travel mugs.
Your belief that we care about your safety remains our number one priority, however. With that in mind, we proudly present this year’s 10-step Covid mitigation plan.
Step 1: Hand sanitizer. There will be so much hand sanitizer at the festival this year. You won’t be able to take a half dozen steps in any direction without bumping into a CityFest branded bottle of the stuff. Sure, Covid is airborne and not actually spread by touching things, but we won’t let that stop us from implementing this cost-effective, tremendously visible, and utterly useless safety measure.
![[woman with bottle of hand sanitizer]](https://www.simner.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/F17E091A-D630-4341-A691-71DF40E2BE36-1024x682.jpeg)
Step 2: Advanced porta potty protection. We’ll clean the bathrooms. A lot. Paying people to scrub toilets 24/7 is way cheaper than losing another year’s worth of vendor fees.
Step 3: Masks. Masks are required. Of course they are! We don’t plan to enforce this requirement, but that’s okay, because asking people to wear masks is mean and might start a fight. CityFest is all about community, not about protecting one another from a highly contagious, potentially lethal virus.
Step 4: Vaccination requirements. Everyone attending CityFest must be fully vaccinated. Since this is a huge, open-air event spread across multiple venues, we have no way of checking on this, but you vaccinated people all know who you are, right? Everyone else can just stay home. Especially the immune compromised, because culture and community are only for healthy people anyway.
Step 5: Outdoor venues. All of our events will be outdoors, except the ones that aren’t. Science says you can’t catch Covid outside, not even when crammed so tightly together in front of a rickety music stage with poor acoustics that you can taste the powdered sugar from that funnel cake your neighbor had for lunch.
![[outdoor crowd clapping and raising fists]](https://www.simner.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/C711B1FE-6114-411B-B287-3E1057D2321B-1024x682.jpeg)
Step 6: Social distancing. Thanks to the crowds, you won’t be able to see the pavement markers telling attendees to stand six feet apart, but we assure you they’ll be there.
Step 7: Food trucks. If a food can be deep fried, there’ll be a food truck deep frying it. This is important because everyone knows you can’t catch Covid while eating. If you could, our city leaders would be morally culpable for not shutting down all restaurant dining, and who wants to believe that? Nobody, that’s who. So just keep some cheesy fries or a turkey leg with you at all times and you’ll be fine.
![[Food truck labeled "Rainbow grilled cheese experience"]](https://www.simner.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/7F4B41AE-C192-4E9F-A06F-922717161C54-1024x682.jpeg)
Step 8: Children’s craft area. We’ve expanded our children’s activities this year. We’re not sure why, since kids can’t be vaccinated yet and so according to our own guidelines shouldn’t even be here.
Step 9: Virtual options. We’ll livestream video of all our events, so that those uncomfortable attending in person can be utterly horrified by those who aren’t uncomfortable at all.
Step 10: Signs. We’re printing thousands and thousands of signs, and every one of them will contain a complete list of these mitigation steps. Does it get any safer than that? We certainly don’t think so.
So there you have it. With these measures in place, we’re confident everyone will have a fun, safe CityFest while buying out our entire supply of souvenir flash drives, LED keychains, and sandstone coasters. But even should everything go horribly wrong, rest assured that there’s no way to contact trace events like this anyway, so our lawyers assure us that we—we mean you—will be just fine.