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February meant we were fewer than two months away from GASP, and while we had done a lot already, there was still plenty more to do. For starters, I had not contacted liability insurance companies yet — I was really dragging my feet. I also had to build both an online and printed program. I had to meet with a DJ, since our original DJ had to bow out due to health concerns. And more besides.

One thing we decided on was how we were going to do our charity auction. Instead of your traditional silent auction, where if people won they had to then come up and pay, we would do a silent raffle — one table collecting money and distributing tickets, $1 apiece or more at discounted rates. The tickets could be used at the spanking booth or as entries for the auction items. Speaking of the spanking booth, we approached the late Mike_Stein, who passed away shortly after GASP, to run that for us, since he’d run spanking booths before.

While we had already contracted with Cheeky Spankos to run our school event, we also wanted to have a more traditional “principal’s office” roleplay scenario set up for those who didn’t want to do a whole afternoon of school. We approached a couple of people we knew well — who had never done this type of event but who were well-versed in role-play — and they agreed to do it. I definitely wanted different principals than all the other parties, so people could get a new experience under their belts. We put the principal’s office on the schedule in three different places.

Another thing spanking parties often have to deal with is called “pipe and drape” — PVC or metal pipe frames with black drapes hanging from them to keep non-attendees from seeing anything they shouldn’t. The hotel was going to charge us thousands of dollars, but thankfully we found a solution that ended up only costing a few hundred, and we can reuse it every year.

There was a ton of minutiae as well:

• Adding the littles’ room to the schedule.
• Figuring out how many ice chests we had access to.
• Getting additional chairs from the hotel in various locations.
• Use of the staff elevator.
• Who will do ticket sales at the vendor fair?
• When will the tables be ready for dinner on Saturday night so we can add our decor?

And, finally, we had to pull a list of people who were eligible for our custom commemorative implement, which we gave away to folks who bought their tickets early and booked their hotel rooms equally early.

By 2/4, we had sold 188 tickets — a lot of people bought theirs after the new year.

We skipped the mid-February meeting, as many of the leadership team were at Oasis in Las Vegas, and reconvened on February 25. The first thing we addressed was the water situation — getting the hotel to provide water in our suites could be tricky, as the staff would have to see and hear what was going on, so we decided to go with purchasing cases of water at $4 apiece. We bought a lot of water.

We also had to do some schedule shuffling to try and accommodate Magic Steve’s spanking magic show as well as the Judicial Punishment event. Unfortunately Steve didn’t end up doing his show in 2024 because his flight got changed, but we’ll try to do that in 2025. Meanwhile, Judicial was placed on the calendar and we approached someone experienced with running it to handle it for us. He accepted.

I built out the program and showed it to the team, and also created a Quick Links page that the QR code on the badges would link to, so that anyone who needed information could get it quickly. I submitted a few requests for quotes to liability insurance companies, and I set an all-staff meeting for March 10 — not just the leadership team, but all the other folks who would be helping out, such as the aforementioned Judicial person, our DJ, Mike_Stein, our principals, and others. At the end of the meeting, we reviewed our registration numbers, and they were, quite frankly, mind-blowing:

• 221 tickets sold
• 69 tops, 66 bottoms, 59 switches
• 100 male-identifying, 92 female-identifying

We’d also opened up registration for our sign-up events — Judicial, Principal, Fraternity/Sorority, and Littles’ Tea Party. We had already filled up Judicial by the 25th, as well as Fraternity/Sorority, but to my surprise we still had a lot of openings available for the principal’s office.

Starting on March 3, we would meet every Sunday until the event. We still had so much to do, and the list was growing with each passing day.