Honfest 2014: We did it!

June 19th, 2014 by The Professor

It’s all over but the editing… WLOY hosted 15 amazing musical acts over 2 days on the first-ever WLOY STAGE at Honfest this year!  We had a blast, made a ton of friends, introduced a lot of people to new artists and generally enjoyed the hell out of the weekend.  The weather might well have been the best at any Honfest ever, save for a teensy bit of wind which made us attach the stage to an i-beam, and the crowds were great.  We had a lot of staff show up to help run the tents, despite it being summer and them living far away.  Alumni fairly came out of the woodwork all weekend long, stopping by to say hi, help man the tent and run the stage and even a couple of performers.

We have to give a big shout out to Matt Whitcomb and Jonathan Prozzi ’08 for making the stage run smoothly and sound great all weekend long.  They deftly danced between solo acoustic artists and plugged in 4-piece acts with smiles and swift hands.  We’ve got some recordings to share from the stage so keep an eye out for them soon.  It’s going to be hard to pick the best things to share but we’re working on it.

Phil Dayao ’16 was running around with a pair of GoPro cameras in hand, on a cat helmet, and even mounted to the stage tent.  Lots of video of the crowd and bands to follow too!  We heard a lot of praise for Phil’s fantastic graphics all weekend and we know he’s going to have an even bigger role in Honfest 2015!

Brandon Newby ’15, Leandra Caprini-Rosica ’17, and Joe Lomuti ’14 swapped the MC duties around during the event keeping everyone appraised of the upcoming acts, our Shindig ticket raffles and the excellent Honfest shirts we were selling.  Joe managed to give a couple away to kids and nearly caused a riot when all the kids in the crowd rushed the tent thinking the shirts were all free 😉

Lauren Puleo ’15, Patricia Bryan ’15, Sam Chemali ’17, Kat O’Brien ’16, all helped run the double tent, convincing passing strangers to buy WLOY gear, take an entire bin full of free CDs and water their dogs.

We even had an end of the day appearance by Leslie Weis ’16, although she refused both a beehive and the cat helmet cam much to our general disappointment.

Alumni General Managers Amanada Nolan ’12 and Christa Constantine ’13 trekked down from their mid-atlantic homes to check up on us. As part of the unplanned gathering of past GMs, Tim Teeling ’11 also wandered by, as did other WLOY alumni Billy Potter ’11 and Taylor DeBoer ’11.  Ok, mostly they came to watch Maria Dontas ’12 perform, but we can respect that.  Speaking of alumni performers, we had back Mike McMonagle ’07 to grace the stage and sport a classic Loyola College trucker hat that would probably fetch huge eBay money now…

It’s impossible to talk about our stage without mentioning the absolutely amazing cast of artists that came and performed all weekend long. They were so generous with their time and talent it’s hard to express how honored we were to have them all there. From Sahffi kicking us off on Saturday morning to Caleb Stine closing us out on Sunday night, every one of them gave a fantastic performance and drew a crowd of new fans. We heard, repeatedly, from vendors and Honfest staff that the stage had the best draw ever, the best lineup and the most positive feedback. It’s hard to top that so maybe we should quit now?

The full schedule (and links to the artists pages) is here – go buy their stuff!!!

Watch this space for a gallery full of images and links to the videos as we put them up. Honest we’ll have that done before Honfest 2015…

Tags: Hampden, Hon, Honfest 2014, WLOY stage