The Dirt Field

On Saturday, my friend Bobby and I volunteered with the Make-a-Wish foundation at the Vintage Virginia Wine Festival. My parents have been volunteers with Make-a-Wish for quite some time, and have always enjoyed working at Vintage Virginia. After crying through a particularly sappy episode of Maury where a sobbing teenage girl in a wheelchair had her lifelong wish to meet Bizzy Bone (evidently a rap star of some sort) granted, Bobby and I decided that we too wanted to volunteer. Vintage Virginia seemed like the perfect place to start.

In my mind, I pictured handing out wineglasses in a breezy linen tent or pouring wine samples while chatting jovially with wine connoisseurs. In reality, I spent hours standing in the glaring sun checking IDs and wrapping paper bracelets around the sweaty wrists of people entering the festival while Bobby scanned tickets and assisted with the ID checking. I don’t think a hotter place existed anywhere on Earth, and I became increasingly disheartened as fresh, crisp looking girls in breezy sundresses presented their immaculate wrists for me to band. “Hello,” they’d say sweetly, and I’d respond by dripping my melted flesh onto them.

As the main rush of crowds died down, we moved to the wine pick up tent, where we would use visitors’ claim tickets to locate cases and bottles of wine that they had purchased and sent to the tent for storage throughout the day. The organization in the tent, while apparently an improvement on previous years, was still somewhat lacking, and I spent endless minutes searching for hidden boxes of wine as people became more and more impatient. I am certain that right now, there is still somebody standing at the front of that tent, clutching a sweaty claim ticket and exclaiming, “But I bought it TWENTY-SIX HOURS AGO. Why is it not here? It’s a case from Spring Otter Ridge Moose Creek Vineyards. Why can’t I come back there and look?!”

By the end of our shift, we were sunburned, sweaty, and caked with dirt and sunscreen. I had also peed exactly once in eight hours, despite consuming one soda, one glass of wine, and approximately six bottles of water, because the only available bathroom facility was the portable kind. Personally, I’d rather pee on my own face than use a portable toilet, so it should come as no surprise that I’d held it all day, except for the one time I sneaked away from the crowds to pee behind a dumpster. It was an enormous dumpster that was open on one side, and despite the vast amount of open space upon which he could have urinated, Bobby chose to go inside the dumpster, strictly so he could say he’d peed in a dumpster. Just to help him out, I’m now making sure the Internet also knows of his wonderful accomplishment.

In the car on the way home, Bobby and I tried to think positively about our day by listing reasons why the day had been good. We came up with the following:

1. We were on time.
2. We did not die.
3. The sun was out.

I must be perfectly honest and say that, despite all of our complaining, it was actually pretty fulfilling to know that by volunteering just one day out of our busy lives, we were able to actually raise money for a good cause. We’ll probably even go so far as to sign up again for next year’s festival, although at least one of us will think for a moment to ask if we couldn’t possibly also get paid.