Wisconsin Fall Festival Season Reaches "Saturation Point"; Organizers Recommend Alphabetical Selection Method

WAUKESHA — I own a wall calendar, a phone calendar, and a shared family calendar my husband updates roughly never, and as of this week none of the three can tell me whether I'm free on the third Saturday in October. That's not a personal failing so much as a math problem. The Wisconsin Tourism Board now counts 163 officially registered fairs and festivals running from September through November of this year, up from a figure nobody I called could confirm as a prior-year baseline, because apparently nobody has ever needed one before now.

Patricia Melsness, a Waukesha resident I reached by phone after she posted about the problem in a community group, put it plainly: prioritizing this fall's events is "basically impossible to navigate without a spreadsheet." She has built the spreadsheet. She showed it to me over a shared screen. It has color coding, a distance-from-home column, and a tab labeled "REGRETS" that is already four rows long in late September.

163 Events, One County That Just Had Its Turn

Waukesha's own contribution to the glut concluded this past weekend, when this paper reported that Waukesha Oktoberfest closed out a two-day run at Frame Park with more than 4,100 attendees, a record for the event, alongside stein-holding competitions and a laser light show that parking attendants described afterward as "controlled chaos." That's one weekend, one city, one event out of 163. The Warrens Cranberry Festival, further north, is projecting north of 145,000 attendees over its own run, which by itself is larger than Waukesha's entire population turning up for cranberries.

Diane Vandehey, who chairs Waukesha's own county fair planning committee and has spent parts of the last two summers mediating the committee's funnel cake versus cream puff booth disputes, told me she doesn't envy whoever has to rank all 163 events against each other. "We can't even get four people to agree on a fried dough item," Vandehey said. "I don't know how you're supposed to get 72 counties to agree on a calendar."

"It's basically impossible to navigate without a spreadsheet."

— Patricia Melsness, Waukesha resident

The App That Might Fix This, Eventually

The Wisconsin Tourism Board is now considering a festival calendar mobile app that would let residents filter the 163 events by category, expected attendance, and travel time, according to materials this paper reviewed. A preliminary draft of the app includes, as a built-in fallback for anyone who still can't decide, an alphabetical sorting option. Under that system, a resident who can't choose between two same-weekend events simply attends whichever one comes first in the alphabet, which means, this fall, Wisconsinites who defer to the app are functionally more likely to end up at an Apple Festival than a Zoo Boo.

I asked Vandehey what she thought of alphabetical sorting as a civic decision-making tool. She considered it longer than I expected. "Honestly, it's no worse than how we picked this year's cream puff vendor," she said. "We went alphabetically through the applicant binder too. Nobody complained about that one."

Nobody Is Actually Against Any Individual Festival

What's notable, talking to people this week, is that no one is arguing any single event on the list of 163 shouldn't exist. Melsness told me she has genuine affection for at least nine of the festivals she's already ruled out attending this year. The problem isn't quality. It's that Wisconsin appears to have built an events calendar the way Waukesha built its East Avenue roundabout: with total confidence that everyone using it will simply figure it out in real time.

The tourism board's app is not expected to launch before this festival season ends, which means the 163-event backlog will resolve itself the old way, by scarcity of weekends rather than software. Melsness said she's made peace with her spreadsheet's REGRETS tab growing before Halloween. "At a certain point you stop grieving the festivals you're missing," she said, "and just get excited about the ones on your calendar in blue." I didn't ask what blue meant. I have a feeling that's a fifth tab.