CD That's Me

Last night's Grammy Awards inspired this post, although I really did not watch the whole show. I tend to focus on what everyone is wearing to these shindigs and on any live performances rather than the actual awards. Plus in this case, I knew this year would be all about the two queens.

As we know, you can rewatch just about every minute and relive just about every detail the next day on social media. . . whether they are good or bad minutes and details. Last night there were quite a few faux pas - Adele's restart, Metallica's frontman not having a microphone, Laverne Cox not even introducing Metallica and more. In an event producers world, the missteps are what we lose sleep over and that can ruin a reputation.

As I tell my interns, it is how you handle these missteps that matters. I have been producing events for years and could write a book on all the things that have gone wrong that have now become funny stories. The featured photo here is a colleague and me working a recent charity dinner in NYC. It was a very high profile event with a long celebrity attendee list and swarms of security and press. Staff, of course, is expected to behave a certain way - skip to the above photo again. First, I don't even know how we found time to gather for a "girls photos" and then I leaned back onto the table of perfectly stacked wine glasses. . . hundreds and hundreds of them. Hence the face. Nothing happened and we got this shot.

There have been plenty of other events where "situations" have arisen. At one charity golf event, I had to call an ambulance to the course 4 times (the last time was for a golfer who had flipped his golf cart). At another, this one a charity dinner, I had the fire alarm go off 3 times in less than 2 hours. During one weekend long series of sporting events, we lost an intern (as in she could not be found for two days and my other staff elected not to tell me). This same event, I had a guest tackle a vacuum cleaner in the elevator. . . you're getting the picture? More recently at a late night event in NYC, a piece of necessary AV equipment was lost in the packaging and not recovered until 10 minutes before show time. The hits keep coming, at another charity event the hotel mistook all our live auction items for trash (we found them), and even most recently, my 2016 Christmas dinner here at Casa DiCarlo brought some surprise guests - the Boston Fire Department, who had to come to our rescue for after an over zealous merlot jus smoked up the kitchen. Mistakes happen and my list goes on and on and on.

Now, in some cases the audience is going to know there is a problem - last night Adele stopping and restarting (gloriously might I add) was a big clue. Also from last night, we couldn't hear Metallica's James Hetfield, another big clue, but rest assured, my guests definitely heard the smoke alarm in our home at Christmas!!!

My solution always remains the same. If you stay calm and focus on how to fix the problem, as opposed to what went wrong, your event will still appear seamless to the audience and you will have succeeded.

After all, the show must go on.