We have a lot of different vendors working in our vendor collective here in the Midwest, in our little event planning boutique. We have djs, photographers, florists, ceiling drapery installers, caterers, dessert specialists, honeymoon specialists, Christmas Nutcracker builders (this is a thing), a girl who paints you as your live event unfolds, a caricature artist, balloon artists, and more. And despite the variety of skills these people possess, they all have one thing in common: they bring with them, an emergency kit.
I am an Event Coordinator. My emergency kit looks very different than the one the dj brings! He has cords, batteries, extra microphones, and very expensive speakers. My cake designer has extra frosting, dowel rods, and perfectly sculpted edible flowers. She does not need extra microphones, nor does the dj need extra frosting. They all bring their own tools to the party.
My emergency kit has affectionately become known as my Mary Poppins Bag. If you haven’t seen the movie stop reading, leave work, and go home with popcorn right now to watch it. It’ll make you laugh like a kid. Anyway, Mary Poppins has a bottomless carpet bag that she pulls stuff out of for the kids; and I have a striped ratty bottomless bag full of paperclips, pipecleaners, a couple different staple guns, clothespins (some with glitter, some without), Advil, floral wire and floral tape, a variety of utility knives and scissors, zip ties (which my other decorator friends and I share and fight over by the way, cuz wow a wedding really requires a lot of them. You’d be surprised.) The kit changes depending on the event I’m working, but typically an event day for me is about 12 hours long as requires me to show up in disgusting clothes to set up and then pretty clothes to change into when the event starts; so my bag may also have a curling iron in lipgloss in it. One time a groomsman broke his pants and we fixed them for him with a pack of binder clips I had in my Mary Poppins Bag. You never know.
The point is, you can’t arrive at the event without your emergency kit. You can’t go to the jobsite without your toolbox. Or worse, arrive with an empty toolbox! Make sure, this spring, you have a nice full toolbox. And make sure if you need microphones you’re not bringing frosting!