NeuroRestorative Florida’s program in Clearwater recently hosted a fun-filled Fall Festival attended by participants and staff. The two stories below describing the festival and its activities were written by NeuroRestorative participants:
Fall Festival
By Shane
Here in Clearwater, Florida, the NeuroRestorative staff decided to have a Fall Festival on our campus. I volunteered to help get things ready for the Fall Festival. I set up the tables and the chairs so that people could sit down and eat.
The participants and staff from the Lutz, Orlando and Sarasota programs attended our Fall Festival too. Because I had been a participant at Lutz, I knew all of the participants and staff who came to the festival. I enjoyed seeing people that I knew during my recovery there.
At the Fall Festival, there was a Halloween costume contest. There were a few participants wearing some very interesting costumes. One of them wore a “dinner date” costume, and he actually made himself a dinner table. I thought that was a pretty cool and different costume.
There were other participants wearing cool costumes too, but I can’t remember every costume that I saw.
The Clearwater campus kitchen staff provided lunch for us at the festival. There were corn dogs, hamburgers, hot dogs and salads. They also served us tasty desserts which included cupcakes decorated with bones and skulls, and they were good! They also had candies that were in wrappers that looked like pumpkins. I drank a sports drink, but they also had soft drinks and bottles of water.
They had a dunking booth there too. It was very interesting to see people throw a ball at a target to get Ms. Kristy (Program Director) to fall into the water. I tried to dunk Ms. Kristy, but didn’t have a good enough aim to dunk her. They also had participants singing karaoke there too.
Overall, all of the participants that attended had a very good time, and they appreciated the fact that NeuroRestorative hosted the Fall Festival!
Getting It All Together
By Julio and Darleen
Getting our annual Fall Festival together is not an easy task. By looking at the outcome it seems almost effortless but there were many hours of prep work, sweat and tears that needed to go into it. First choosing a theme that would be fun to work around was our first task. Creepy carnival it is! Getting everyone on board with decorations, costumes, and entertainment was our next step.
Decorations were made by everyone and we mean everyone! Countryside helped with our paper mache clowns that sat as centerpieces, and Virginia and Oaks did the skull heads and skeletons. Each task was carefully designed and decorated with much thought. In the wood shop Ms. Harriett, Patricia, Matt, Frank, Dadria, Julio and Helena designed, constructed and painted booths, stands, clowns and anything and everything that they could.
Costumes were selected and designed by participants and staff, all willing to help each other with putting them together. A nip here and a tuck there and some of them were literally stitched on. Wigs, makeup, clown noses and sequins ran wild trying to get just the right look. Ms. Harriett worked on costumes also. I don’t know what we would have done without her.
Finding the entertainment was a no brainer; La’Darius always has great music and a bigger than life personality that brings the house down! We knew that was going to be a great choice by having him be our DJ.
Weeks have gone by and as the tent went up we started feeling excited about the entire thing that would be coming alive. Kim, Lucas and Julio blew up over 100 balloons. And Charlie doing high wire acts on the ladder by putting up decorations in the tent, even without a net! Joe, Cindy, Lisa and Cade put up streamers, creepy decor and table clothes. We had such great fun watching everything come together. Brightly colored decorations soon filled the entire tent.
On the big day a ton of last minute touches needed to be done. So many little details that might not have seemed to be of any significance but made it special. 10:00 a.m. and the place was grand, what a sight to see! It truly looked like a carnival. Looking around at everything and watching everyone work together as a team made it all worthwhile. We could not have asked for a better day to have our Fall Festival and a better group to host it. There were so many great people that did so much to make this happen with all our deepest love and appreciation—THANK YOU! Let the show begin!