It’s all about experience

Experience is the key word for the upcoming Experience Louisiana Festival, a crowd of about 40 people heard Thursday.
The first general meeting for the Oct. 17-18 festival was held at the Community Education Building on the Louisiana State University Eunice campus. The building and its grounds will be site of the festival.
Dwight Jodon, one of the organizers for the Eunice Rotary Club, which launched the festival idea, said he was pleased with the meeting.
“We’ve already seen every time we have a meeting or we get people together new ideas grow,” Jodon said.
Pat Dossman, another organizer, said, “You can see them thinking” of the crowd as festival events were outlined and proposed.
The next step for her, she said, is “hitting the grants trail. Dwight and I have several grants in mind. I mentioned the two New York Life grants so each one of us can do a grant through New York Life.”
Dossman and Lynn Lejeune plan on hitting the fundraising trail, she said.
The Rotary Club project aims to bring back something like the state-funded Louisiana Folklife Festival that was held in Eunice in the 1980s and 1990s.
“Eunice was a destination,” Jodon said. “People were coming from all over the state and the world to little Eunice. The state festival moved. Long story short, it hasn’t happened for a long time.”
Jodon said, “How cool would it be to bring something like that back and bring that spirit back and put Eunice on the map as a destination. But also a place to celebrate the culture, the food and everything that is great about Louisiana.”
While the Experience Louisiana Festival will have exhibits Jodon stressed the key ingredient is experience.
“Note, everything we are trying to do is relating to an experience,” he said. “We don’t want people to come and see. We want people to come and be a part of the festival.”
As an example, Dossman said there will be boudin-making demonstrations, but the boudin makers should “call somebody out of the audience. ‘Come do this.’ They will go back and say, ‘I actually got to make boudin.’”
Greg Brown, president of the Cajun French Music Association, Acadiana Chapter, said, I think it will be a nice festival. I think it can be very attractive for the city of Eunice and beneficial ...”