You know an inaugural festival has been a success when, after the temperature reached 95 degrees, humidity topped 80%… perspiration stains were so pervasive that it was the odd dry spots that looked like stains… constant 12-minute trudges back and forth between two action-packed stages threatened to sap what few excess pounds hadn’t been sweated off… and you realized that, amid those conditions, you had not sat down in more than 10 hours… and, sitting in a gridlocked lot waiting to get out, all you could think was:
How soon do we get to do this again?
The answer to that, at the end of the Daisy Chain Fields festival Saturday in Irvine, Calif., was some time around this year in 2027. Festival creator and headliner Olivia Rodrigo told the 45,000-strong crowd the words they wanted to hear: that this was not a one-off, and that we’d reconvene next year for another thrillingly curated, expertly executed and altogether spirit-rewarding all-female-led bill. (Flowery adjectives ours, not hers.)
Now if they could just find a way to schedule future editions of the festival at a more meteorologically reasonable time, some period of the year where it is reliably warm in SoCal yet not prone to insanely long heat waves, because climate change has abated and… well, never mind, fine … August probably is as good a time as any.
