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player ready...It may seem odd that organizers on Monday officially canceled the Chicago Hot Dog Fest, a three-day event in Lincoln Park that had been scheduled to begin four months from Tuesday.
Four months! That sounds like an eternity when you think of how slowly March alone unfolded. By Aug. 7, what was to have been the first day of the Chicago History Museum’s eighth annual jubilee in honor of one of this area’s most beloved, uh, delicacies, who knows what life will be like?
By then, public officials may have lifted the stay-at-home orders and rescinded the suggestion that we stay 6 feet away from those who aren’t members of our households. The general fear may have all but passed that every close brush with a stranger poses a grave risk to our health or the health and safety of others, including the medical personnel on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Or maybe not. We’re in a highly uncertain moment right now, when epidemiologists and infectious disease experts are modeling various trajectories for this crisis and the rest of us are making what amounts to wild guesses about how the summer and fall will unfold.
You can manage that uncertainty if you’re planning a block party or company outing several months from now. But with bigger events, the risks are daunting and they grow nearly every day, even this far in advance.
Last year, the Chicago Hot Dog Fest featured roughly a dozen musical acts and a dozen food vendors as well as a busy speakers’ stage. The process of lining all that up — signing the contracts, pulling the permits, recruiting literally hundreds of volunteers, designing marketing materials, lining up the corporate sponsors and so on — begins in December, according to John Russick, the museum’s senior vice president for interpretation and education.
The margins are slim. Russick said the organization generally invests about $250,000 in putting on the festival and, as long as the weather holds out, realizes about $50,000 in “profits,” which go toward supporting the museum.
Four months out is when those upfront investments and other financial commitments really begin to ramp up, Russick said. So the question recently became, even if the stay-at-home order is lifted by August, will the parks be open? And even if the parks are open, will the public be sufficiently comfortable again in large crowds to jostle together at what’s billed at “the city’s largest picnic,” an event that last year drew an estimated 35,000 visitors over three days?
That nearly unanswerable question has been on a lot of minds lately. Just about every conversation I have ultimately gets around to someone asking, “when will we feel comfortable again in big groups of strangers?”
I put that question in a “state-of-mind” click poll on social media Monday, and only 42% of 450 respondents indicated that they now think they’ll feel comfortable in crowded public settings before September unless a vaccine or extremely effective drug treatment for COVID-19 becomes available.
But even if such therapies become widely available, will the economic damage wrought by the pandemic leave potential Chicago Hot Dog Fest goers feeling too financially stressed to attend? “Ultimately,” Russick said, “this health crisis is going to be experienced by most of us as an economic crisis. That stands to hurt the museum as well, so ultimately we decided we just couldn’t chance taking a big loss.”
The museum outsources the handling of many of the logistics to Big Buzz Idea Group, a Chicago company that helps not-for-profits put on events. Big Buzz founder and President Melissa Lagowski said it’s always better to cancel or postpone events early because “it’s very difficult to untangle the web once you begin to weave it. It’s even hard just to try to hit ‘pause.'”
So what’s odd, in the end, is not that the Hot Dog Fest is off, but that so many other events scheduled for August are still on. Notably Lollapalooza, the mammoth, four-day music festival that draws 400,000 spectators to Grant Park, is still set for July 30 through August 2.
Organizers usually announce the lineup of featured performers in mid-March, and that they have made no such announcement yet seems to be a sign, as Billboard put it, that the festival’s “fate is uncertain.”
Lollapalooza did not respond to my request for comment, but the festival’s Twitter feed says, “While we stay in close contact with local officials, we are well underway with planning for Lolla to take place as soon as it’s safe for us all to be together in Grant Park.”
That will be a lovely day indeed. But the idea that it will be in early August seems more like a fantasy than a plan.
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