Folks, this is an absolutely wonderful response! I am so pleased to see so much interest and so many excellent ideas. And so many folks who are already planning to be here! Good stuff.

We're having a house concert here (Danny Spooner) next Thursday and then I'm off to Augusta Vocal Week, then four days at home, and a trip to Massachusetts for a friend's 50th birthday (a mere baby!) so I may or may not be able to respond to each individual idea right away.

But I have to write up a notice next week for the FSGW newsletter asking for input. I plan to list all of your suggestions as of the time I submit it, and ask for ideas from the newsletter readers as well.

I'll see if I can get my write-up posted on the FSGW web site, too.

Keep those cards and letters coming! (uhhh... e-cards and e-letters, I guess....)

As to the ideas suggested above, I like 'em all. Really I do. There is an excellent balance of different styles and themes suggested so far, all of it interesting.

We'll see how many of them I can fit into the program. With luck, we may be able to use all of them. They are really good ideas.

Part of the challenge is to find a knowledgeable leader for each workshop. Another challenge is to have a fair selection of people involved as leaders, and to have some variety from year to year, and not to play favorites, and not to set up workshops that nobody wants to go to, and not to create too many conflicts in each hour's schedule, and not to make too many workshop leaders miserable by scheduling them against their second favorite event of the weekend, and to make allowances for people who will only be there for one day or the other, and... you get the picture.

Wow. Maybe you folks will do so much of the work for me that I won't even be an exhausted nervous wreck this year by the time Getaway weekend rolls around. Wouldn't that be nice. :-)