WI Film Fest Crystal Ball poster
I made the $75 donation for three people, and Mark and I and our visiting Japanese student went off to the Hilldale shopping mall on Friday evening for this fund-raiser event. It was a little disappointing. The only food that there was really enough of was platters of gado-gado – Indonesian peanut sauce, served with steamed vegetables and cubes of tofu. Prepared by our local grocery store in the shopping mall, Metcalfe’s Sentry – that does have its own star chef. So I guess it’s not too weird that an Indonesian dish prepared by a Wisconsin grocery store was the best food at a benefit – just post-modern, maybe. There were chicken drummies and meatballs and free beer from the local brew pub, and a salad from a wood-fired pizza place, that was down to a few leaves and little crumbs of cheese when we got there, even though the party had only been going about 20 minutes, and was never replenished. There were also supposed to be cupcakes, but all I ever saw was the empty platters for those. The door prize was a chance to buy your tickets early, so cost them nothing, as Mark said. The silent auction looked like they got a bunch of the Hilldale merchants to do some basement- and shelf-clearing – worse than Maxwell Street Days. They could’ve recruited much better stuff for the auction – and what about real entertainment?
They had trailers for the upcoming films running on large screens, but mostly it was a lot of people milling around in the dark on the cement flooring of an empty store space in the mall. I didn’t even realize til Saturday morning that tickets went on sale today at noon. Seems like they should have given us all early access for buying tickets at the Ball for our $25 donations. Or what if they had long tables with like 8 film fest volunteers, with info about the films, and some kind of order sheet, so attendees could sit down and make their list of the films they want to see, last night, so they’d be ready this a.m. – that wouldn’t have cost the organizers anything either, and would have made the event much more fun and exclusive.
So we left and went to eat dinner at Pasqual’s – and that was a little disappointing, too. I had a shredded beef quesadilla – the filling was kind of like beef stew – too much moisture – so the whole thing was a little soggy. If I’d been making it, I would have put the shredded beef in a skillet with some oil and chile powder and crisped it up before putting it into the tortillas. Oh well, at least we went out on a Friday night.
