Spending my extra daylight savings time hour tonight watching the new Jenny Nicholson video and referring to it as "Jenny's Hour"
oh my god i'm so excited about this one actually because i have skin in the game. i've been following this project for a decade and i visited evermore park for the first time almost 1 year ago today. i have been watching the video and the bit about the taylor swift lawsuit made me laugh so hard i almost barfed.
i remember distinctly that they had a handler from a local wildlife rehabilitation center that let me get up close and personal with a eurasian eagle-owl. i asked them for some credentials because i was concerned about the idea of a theme park owning a eurasian eagle-owl, but they assured me they were legitimate handlers and had been hired by the park. getting to have an up-close and personal experience with an owl counts as bribing the judges, assuming i was the judge. i would have paid $30 for that alone.
aside from that, it was basically a renaissance fair.
i can confirm that the main attraction of this place was the performers. they were good performers. there's no way these people were being paid their worth. the "guild" experience was clearly somewhat improvised, you could go up to a person wearing a specific color of shield or lanyard that indicated they were actors to ask for a quest, and the quests involved finding other actors with specific behaviors and interacting with them as a sort of reconnaissance. in return, you would get a worthless trinket like a plastic vial of liquid or a plastic sprocket, which could be traded for equally useless souvenirs.
they had a halloween circus event that happened every 30 minutes which was genuinely not too bad. it featured skilled jugglers and ribbon dancers, and they were definitely not being paid enough for the job. i was with a friend much more extroverted than i was, he was really eager to play a role and to interact with the actors at the venue. when he would do this we would spread out to various degrees depending on our levels of comfort. one of the actors joked, saying "i like your group, it's like you've formed a chart of how shy you are".
i guess my main point is that if you're in utah county in october and you want something to do, go to cornbellies and do their corn maze instead. it's better and also less expensive.
jenny nicholson: "the greenhouse is mostly empty with benches inside because it houses a bird show, we'll put a pin in that"
me w/ great salt lake audubon board of directors on speed dial: [david byrne voice] uh-oh!
UPDATE: The bird show didn't seem negligent, just boring. If you're in Utah and you want to experience birds in a touristy way, you can't beat Tracy Aviary. A way better use of your money than evermore park imo.