Wedding or Gang Initiation?

In a few minutes, I'll let you know how long it takes to pick a pint of strawberries. I suspect it will be less than two minutes. They are at that "ridiculously easy" stage of harvesting, so if you like strawberries--and you want a bargain activity with the kids--come on up.

Yesterday a group of location scouts from the Inland Empire Film commission tooled around the farm taking their panorama shots. I think there were some pretty big television shows represented. We let film companies look around, but we turn down an awful lot of them, if we don't think the project is worth promoting. I turned down MTV twice, and about a month ago, I took a gander at the photography of a guy who wanted to do a "fashion runway on the farm." I concluded he he was one of those fruits who enjoy demeaning women for profit, so I told him no thanks. If you ever have a chance to participate in a reality show, by the way, say no. The producers of reality shows are liars--from start to finish. So, we get a lot of lookers, but we don't always ink a deal.

We have a vaguely similar problem with respect to weddings on the farm in that we very heavily promote traditional music to the point that if someone mentions their own band or a D.J., we usually say no. One bride brought up a really neat Irish band and we went along with that, but when someone proposes a D.J., or even a CD of favorites, those things can descend into rap-and-rave-fests within a matter of minutes. (You try telling a juiced-up band of big guys in tuxes their music doesn't fit the Riley's Farm theme.) Some contemporary music, (not all), can make a wedding look more like a gang initation than a celebration of holy matrimony.



Okay, so I'm a folk music snob; it's actually a pretty broad standard though. I would say yes to Mariachis, Big Band, Irish Folk, Blue Grass, Classical, Island music, but if someone put Eminem on the platter and he started in with his F-fest, you might as well turn the old farm into a strip mall and give everyone an Ipod and some face paint. A country wedding should sound at least something like a country wedding.

The kids were watching a wedding reality show last night up at grandma's and the theme seemed to be "Really Extravagant Expensive Could-Have-Purchased-A-Home-with-the-Money-we-Spent-on-this thing" Weddings. No kidding. One of the weddings had a price tag of $450,000. Both of the grooms seemed, um, sort of--how do I put this?--girlish. You would have to be a bit of a femme not to tell the ladies, "look, ladies, with the money you're spending on this we could host a stadium tractor-pull--and make money on the deal."

Anyway, we can host a wedding--a nice, traditional, non-experimental affair for considerably less than half a million dollars.