Super Saturday Will Return
The day I am writing this blog post marks exactly one year since the Museum hosted a Super Saturday. While postponing Super Saturday has been a necessary step to keep everyone safe during the pandemic, I’ve been missing it a lot lately.
For those of you who have never been, Super Saturday is the Museum’s monthly family fun day. Each month has a different theme, often being inspired by a current exhibition or theater show at the Museum, and is a day full of hands-on activities, performances, and special guests.
Super Saturday began in February of 2014, the same month the Evansville Museum’s new Eykamp Pavilion and Koch Immersive Theater & Planetarium opened to the public. The theme was Ancient Egypt. Dr. Jennie Ebeling of the University of Evansville gave a talk on brewing beer in Ancient Egypt, there was a scavenger hunt throughout the Museum and we learned to write in hieroglyphs on real papyrus. The Museum has hosted over 50 Super Saturdays since that very first one, and while I am definitely biased, every single one has been awesome.
Some of my favorite memories:
· Buying over 100 cupcakes to celebrate Indiana’s birthday. My car smelled like chocolate for a week, and it was wonderful.
· Turning the classroom into a cave and creating cave art on its walls.
· Making monsters at the Artspocalypse Super Saturday
· Creating a Glow-in-the-Dark Room
· Experiencing an earthquake in the Indiana Geological Survey’s Quake Cottage
One of the best parts of Super Saturday has been the incredibly cool people who have been a part of the event. Super Saturday is very much a community event, featuring so many different volunteers, organizations and businesses helping to make it a success. We have had special guests from Toyota, Vectren, A CenterPoint Energy Company, Hafer, Ciholas, and many, many others. For several years now, Super Saturday has even had the pleasure of being the location of the University of Evansville’s Balsawood Bridge Competition.
Of course, you can’t pull off amazing events like these without a team of equally amazing volunteers. The Evansville Museum’s Docent Association plays an active role in facilitating the activities each month. In addition, many community members often volunteer. In fact, if you are interested in trying out volunteering at the Museum, Super Saturday might be a great opportunity for you, too.
I'd also like to give a shout out to all of the student volunteers, both college and high school. For many years now, the University of Southern Indiana has brought a group of their international students to volunteer their time at Super Saturdays. It has been so much fun meeting them and incorporating their ideas and experiences into the events while also giving them an opportunity to get out into the community and enjoy more of the Museum. In addition, year after year, students from Signature School have also been invaluable additions to our Super Saturday volunteer team.
As we all know, the best way to ensure happy volunteers is to feed said volunteers, and for us that usually means pizza! Month after month, we would often have the same pizza delivery lady bring us our lunch. She would always wish us a wonderful day, and I like to think of her as an essential component of Super Saturday, too.
It’s not just the volunteers who make Super Saturday, but also the guests. It’s great to see many of the same families come back year after year. One family in particular stands out; at the beginning of Super Saturday, the family added a new baby. It’s been fun seeing how much this child has grown between Super Saturdays. The last time I saw her, she was walking, talking and ready to explore everything!
I don’t yet know when Super Saturday will return, but I do know that when that day comes, we will be ready. We are currently workshopping the most important part of our comeback event – the perfect pun for the event’s title; two top contenders are “Super Saturday Strikes Back” or “Super Saturday: This Time It’s Personal”. We look forward to making it an epic event featuring some of our favorite activities from the past five years.
Of course, if you have any suggestions for activities or collaborators for the future, please reach out to me at Karen@emuseum.org. I hope to see you and your family at Super Saturday soon!