Music festivals, art shows and cooking competitions are commonplace in this country, but a Charlottesville man may have the ticket to something bigger – a week-long event that celebrates all of those things and the quality that connects them.
There’s no denying the influence of television on this year’s Tom Tom Founder’s Festival, with an American-Idol style contest of song writers, a SharkTank-like pitch night for local artists and inventors, and an Iron-Chef-ish competition in which area restaurants send their top kitchen talent to Saturday’s farmer’s market.
“Thirty minutes, run through the market, get all the local food you want, prepareit live, and have it judged.”
That’s Paul Beyer – the guy who started the Tom Tom festival four years ago.
“TomTom is sort of a whimsical tip of the hat to Thomas Jefferson. We’re kind of a TJ town – sometimes annoyingly so. He’s the perfect embodiment of an innovation festival. But I didn’t want it to just be the ‘Thomas Jefferson Festival,’ so ‘Tom Tom’ was kind of a nice way to allude to something more fun.”
Fun indeed, with sixty bands, 50 exhibits and six block parties, including Porchella, in which bands play from the front porches of a charming old neighborhood called Belmont.
The unifying theme is creativity – innovation and the spirit of starting something new, so the highlight of this year’s festival is the Founders Summit, in which nationally known entrepreneurs talk about their babies: Reddit, Gizmodo, the Container Store and other successful enterprises.
“People generally want to know how things started, and I think everyone is a creator, and that’s actually the motto of this year’s festival – it’s ‘Found Yourself.’”
In its first year, Tom Tom drew 8,000 people. This year, Beyer hopes to more than triple attendance and leave a few souvenirs including a 240-foot wall covered by competing graffiti artists and a bus, decorated in psychedelic style, to run between the festival downtown and the University of Virginia campus.
