Fun at the Newtown Street Festival!

We took The One Room Fan Museum to our first fair - appropriately the Newtown Street Festival, in the Wellington NZ suburb that’s home to the Museum. It was a blast!

Our most popular feature was Gollum! We stuffed and wired the Gollum costume and posed him with the One Ring in front of the stall. So many people took his photo and many - especially kids - posed with him, it was cool. He photo-bombed quite a few costume shoots as well. People even posed with him while we were packing up. He was completely exhausted at the end of it all!

We learned that people are really nervous about getting into costume - one guy said he was going to come back after having a beer!!!

But some people, especially kids, took the plunge and had a fantastic time. There was one wee girl who must have tried on every costume. She came early, and then came back later to try all the other costumes. I wish we’d taken her picture, but we were so busy with the costume changes. Her loving Gran captured every lovely moment, though, and it was pure pleasure to provide such fun. Another dashing young man totally owned the Boromir costume - he said he felt more like himself in the costume than out. Wow!!

Lots of people took brochures, so hopefully they’ll make their way to the Museum in their own time. Someone actually visited the Museum during the fair - only to find we were on location at the Festival. We couldn’t take all the Museum’s treasures to the Festival though - we thought the Police would charge us if we took metal swords! We enjoyed networking with some other “Museums” - a Weta dwarf in full makeup gave us a ceremonial visit, and we met a convenor of the CONZealand, the World Sci Fi Convention being held in Wellington from 29 July to 2 August.

All up, a magic, fun day at the Fair.