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Read more in this series here.

February was a busy month, especially since so many of us went to Oasis, but we got a lot done. March, though, would be our biggest push. The easiest way to share with you what we did in the three weeks leading up to the party is to do bulleted lists, so here we go. We’ll start with our meeting on March 3.

• Volunteers — we had posted our volunteer sign-up sheets online but we were still short of volunteers, especially for badge checking on the 7th and 8th floors (our party floors with public play spaces). StormyGin would be in charge of keeping track of no-shows for volunteer shifts, as everyone who did a shift was entered into a drawing for a free ticket to GASP 2025.
• Although we hadn’t planned on selling Sunday-only passes, there were a few people who wanted them, so I set up a method for them to buy said passes and we decided how we’d check them in.
• As I’ve mentioned in the past in this series, we were planning to be big on inclusivity. To that end, we consulted with a friend of ours who is trans, who suggested not drawing attention to people’s sex with stickers or bracelets, unless they were for who you were interested in — men, women, or either. We decided to only do it during the Spanking Carousel.
• I worked with some liability insurance companies, but no one was willing to underwrite our event. So we went in a different direction, creating a liability waiver that people would have to sign in-person before they could attend any party events. We contacted attorney Sarah Steele, who has a lot of experience in BDSM-related law, to review our document and ensure that it was as airtight as we could get it. Not because we hoped we’d have to use it, but because the last thing I need is to lose my house because someone got spanked too hard.
• For our Atlantis-themed dinner, we needed to make sure that we had the appropriate backdrops, centerpieces, and setups. We also set up a way to collaborate on the playlist for our DJ, so attendees could request songs.
• Although we originally planned to not allow photos in the dungeon, we amended that to allow it as long as a DM was present and made sure there was no one in the photo except those who had consented. I don’t think anyone actually did use the policy, but it was a nice-to-have.
• I created printable versions of the registration form for our walk-up registrants.
• We discussed how we were going to handle emergency phone calls, and decided to use Google Voice. Unfortunately, since I already had one GV number I couldn’t attach a second one to my phone — couldn’t even forward it — we would have to use my GV number. Which is fine; I don’t really use it anymore anyway. We put the emergency number on our quick links page.
• Emails — we had a ton of emails to send out:
  • Did you book any shoulder days? If so, we needed to know ASAP so we could correctly assign them.
  • Did you fill out your registration form? We hadn’t yet figured out how to make sure people did that when they bought their tickets, so we had to have them fill out a separate form each time. This was vitally important. On 3/3 we had 31 attendees who hadn’t filled out their forms.
  • Getting there and getting around — I created a document with information on how to get to the hotel, how to use MARTA, etc.
  • Volunteers — a list of priority slots and a call for volunteer assistance.
  • Reminders of the COVID policy and the party rules.
  • A welcome email to be sent the day before the party with our QR code, quick links, and other important information.
• Allergies — we were still on the hook to meet with the hotel and go over our attendees’ allergy requirements.
• A couple of people popped on our watch list so we discussed them.
• I related that for people on our sign-up lists (Principal, Judicial, Littles, Fraternity/Sorority) I had created a color code indicating whether they’d been contacted or not.
• Signs — what signs did we need made, who was making them, and what were they going to look like?
• I had to meet with the hotel about expanding the vendor fair and dinners — we had half the ballroom, but it looked like we would need three-quarters of it because we now had 256 attendees who had paid for their tickets.

256 people. Holy cow. This was really happening.

We next met on March 10.

• I had an action item to review notes from our all-staff call at 6pm that day if needed. I didn’t note whether we did or not.
• We made our final decision about using bracelets identifying what sex people wanted to play with.
• The Google Voice situation was put to bed.
• We requested from our event coordinator at the hotel to have the chef at our upcoming meeting. We also decided that Saturday night would be buffet, not plated, and the hotel assured us that if we went over our number of projected attendees there would still be enough food for the chef to add more on the fly.
• The hotel approved us expanding the dinner and vendor spaces.
• We sent the run sheet for Fraternity/Sorority roleplay to Respectfirst, our pledgemaster.
• I reached out to a friend of mine who’s run F/F play parties in the past to see if she would be available to run ours. She said yes, and asked if one of her friends could co-run it with her. Since I already knew this friend, I approved it.
• Silverkettle was in charge of our Thursday night pizza dinner. He reached out to the local branch of Marco’s Pizza, since they do large party catering, and I sent him our corporate card information so he could pre-order what we’d need. We wanted salads as well as gluten-free pizza in addition to standard pizza options.
• Our legal review for our liability form was completed.
• We contacted a local friend of ours to be in charge of assembling and disassembling my spanking bench for the various events where it would be needed.
• I planned to communicate the hotel’s housekeeping policy in the next email being sent to attendees.
• Silverkettle wrote calls for tops for our F/F, M/M, and F/M events.
• We finalized how we wanted to receive people’s COVID test results — a method that has since been adopted by TASSP.
• We discussed priority volunteer slots.
• Our final count of guests was 266.

At this point we had one more meeting, which will get its own post next week.