Two-day festival features many new attractions
Published in the May 14-27 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Photo by Sunday Minnich
A volunteer will wear the newly-made Mardi the Mushroom costume during this year’s festival.
People from all around the Bay Area will gather Memorial Day weekend in downtown Morgan Hill to have fun with fungi at the community’s 35th annual Mushroom Mardi Gras. This year, visitors will discover many new attractions — including a Disney show for kids and a friendly mushroom mascot — to enhance their festival fun.
Morgan Hill will be one of 15 cities nationwide to experience the Disney Live Tour hosted by Disney Radio. Special guest Leo Howard, a celebrity on Disney XD radio channel’s “Kickin’ It” show, will entertain Mardi Gras crowds on Sunday April 25 from noon to 4 p.m. on the Downtown Amphitheater stage, said Sunday Minnich, executive director of the mushroom-themed festival.
“They (Disney Radio) contacted us to include the show at the Mardi Gras because we have been advertising with them for the last four or five years,” she said. “We are benefiting from them getting the tour here in this area at the time of the festival. It’s pretty costly to get the tour, so Disney went to get the sponsors to help us pay for coming to us.”
The main sponsor is Dole Squish’ems, a squeezable fruit snack, and samples will be handed out at the Mardi Gras, she said.
Also new at this year’s event is the introduction of a newly designed Mardi the Mushroom costume that will be worn by a volunteer to greet guests. Monterey Mushrooms had provided a mascot in past years, but the costume had aged so much it needed to be “retired,” Minnich said. The Western Mushroom Marketing Association and the Rotary Club of Morgan Hill helped provide funds for the new felt costume, which was made by Carol Fleming Designs in Lodi.
“This is the fourth year for the Rotary to be at the festival and bring back the theme of mushrooms for the festival,” Minnich said. “So we thought, to enhance the theme of the mushrooms and to help promote the mushroom educational side of the festival, we would get a new mushroom mascot.”
The Mardi Gras will feature cooking demonstrations by regional chefs as well as celebrity “singing chef” Andy LoRusso, she said. The comical Saka-Bozzo duo, “twins separated at birth,” will be showcasing mushrooms-on-the-menu dishes. Betty Ewing from the El Cajon Project, a program that teaches culinary arts to at-risk children in Gilroy schools, will also make a guest appearance on the cooking stage.
Music will be a big draw at this year’s Mardi Gras. The Downtown Amphitheater headliner on Saturday afternoon is the band Entourage. Shane Dwight will perform on Sunday afternoon. Other entertainers will perform on The Music Tree Stage on Fourth Street. Strolling entertainers this year will include Mama’s Wranglers, fiddler Dave Rainwater, and Jimbo the Clown. A new entertainer is Tangled Threads, an acrobatic stilt-walker pair that will wow the crowds with amazing feats of agility.
Mardi Gras guests will see a new layout this year to accommodate the more than 250 arts and crafts and vendor booths as well as the Munchkinland carnival rides, the wine and beer garden, and the vendors inside the Community Center, Minnich said. Better signage will also help guests navigate through this year’s festival.
“We moved things around to let the crowds flow better,” she said. “The mushroom exhibit will be right on Depot Street so that no one will miss it, because we still get people who come and ask ‘Where’s the mushroom stuff?’”
The Mardi Gras also improved handicapped parking, a problem in previous years. A shuttle will take people from the handicapped parking area to the festival entrance.
The Mardi Gras raises money that helps Morgan Hill school programs and students. This year, $50,000 in scholarships will be given to local students from money raised at the 2013 Mardi Gras. About $20,000 in donations was given this year to school groups and clubs that helped at last year’s festival. The Mardi Gras also provided $7,500 in mini-grants to elementary and middle schools in Morgan Hill.
Morgan Hill School District Board of Trustees member Ron Woolf, a Mardi Gras organizer and board member, said the success of the annual event depends on how sunny the Memorial Day weekend turns out to be.
“The planning has gone great. What we need now is the weather to cooperate,” he said.
