Photo provided
“Potter Fest 2024: Year One” vendor Em Clegg is shown with her owl and a replica of the Ford Anglia Harry Potter flying car.
Heavens to Hogwarts, does Keisha Keen ever yearn for Saturday to be magical.
And no wonder. The Columbus resident has organized the inaugural “Potter Fest 2024: Year One”, rain or shine, in and in a broad area around the Community Building of the Bartholomew County 4-H Fairgrounds on West County Road 200 Southin Garden City.
She also already has sold 1,000 tickets at $5 apiece (with $5 added for parking), with all wizards and muggles age 12 and younger admitted free. Ideally, she would love to see that ticket sales number rise to perhaps 3,000 by the weekend.
“This idea continually has grown bigger since February,” Keen said.
For those keeping track, it will be 63 Harry Potter-themed vendors big. She hardly just waved a wand for that to happen. But there will be everything from butter beer to hand-sculpted beasts to Mockery Max, a singer of the silly applying Potteresque lyrics to classic pop-rock melodies.
The vocalist has been labeled as “the penultimate parodist.”
All told, vendors are coming from Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio and Kentucky, among other locales.
Keen, who clearly and unabashedly labels herself a Potterhead, describes the overall event from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. as “a magical day full of shopping, themed food and drinks (wand breadsticks to accompany your pizza), photo ops, hourly drawings, costume contest, a walk through the Forbidden Forest, and magical creatures,” such as owls, courtesy of Utopia Wildlife Rehabilitators.
Plus, there will be a Potter-themed escape room and other attractions.
“I want people to have so much fun that they’ll definitely want to come back next year,” Keen said. “And I’d like them to challenge me a little bit afterward — to want a little more than what I have done this year, so I can make next year bigger, and do more the year after that, and the year after that.”
She first saw the fun of the wizarding world when she was a teen. She attended one of her first Potter Fests last year in Franklin, a smaller affair that she said was still quite enjoyable.
A connected evening dinner event arranged like a Harry Potter birthday bash already is sold out at 150 people.
Keen also will include a measure of her other passion: helping cats, which she does through her Copper Kitten Rescue. She may distribute flyers about the importance of spaying and neutering.
Overall, though, she’s hoping to reach other cool cats — area students — and be of a little help to them.
“This is right before school, and they might be a little nervous about going back,” she said. “And this would be a good way for them to unwind.”
