20 STORIES FOR 20 YEARS
Cascio Fonseca
For volunteer and staffing coordinator Cascio Fonseca, Bethel Woods has played a significant role in his personal and professional development. My first concert was a Bethel Woods concert in 2012, Big Time Rush. That was my introduction to music venues. When I was 15, I started going to Project Identity, a program series that is still going today, right in Liberty, where I grew up. I went every Tuesday and Thursday from 2015 through 2017.
Project Identity was art- and music- focused with a theme every week where we talked about what we were working on artistically inside the program, but also in school, and in our personal lives. It was a place where we could have artistic expression, it was really a collaborative, open art space where everyone could share ideas and work on their own individual projects or group art project.
It really helped me explore more of my artistic side, because I never really saw myself as an artist, but through the program, my art got much better. We helped to collaboratively design and create a mural that went up in Liberty, as part of a beautification effort.
In 2018, I began to work at Bethel Woods in Parking, and it was definitely an all elements type of situation. With Bethel Woods being an open-air venue, we are pretty much rain or shine. There are some days where it's pouring rain and you have thousands of cars coming in and it's hectic, but you stay composed because you're the first face that a lot of people see .
People will get here hours before the show starts, and they have their own pop-up tents and they bring their grills and it becomes like its own block party. We just had a show, Yacht Rock Revue, where people showed up right at gate time and then they were doing yoga in the parking lots. I was like, ‘All right. Whatever gets you ready for a show'.
After Covid in 2020, I became an intern and started getting more involved with the volunteers, and when I was in my senior semester in college, I actually ended up getting care packages from some of the volunteers. They were like, ‘Hey, we're thinking of you. We hope you're doing good, here are some things to help you get through the rest of the school year.’ It was snacks and things to make sure I was keeping hydrated and fed. It was a very, very, very nice gesture.
I ended up working my way into Operations, where I've been for the last few years now. I work out of our Command Center here, addressing any staff and volunteer issues that go on throughout the night, so, I'm usually all over the venue on a typical show day. But there are opportunities to see the show, even if it's not sitting down in a seat, but being able to hear it and to catch glimpses of it. You get to at least hear the show no matter where you are in the venue.
There have been times where we have gotten a call that a guest has found their way into one of the golf carts and is going on a joy ride throughout the venue. We get at least one of those per season where someone accidentally leaves a set of keys in a cart and then it's found in one of the parking lots at the end of the night because someone drove themselves to their car.
One of the big things that we deal with is the threat of weather. In the Command Center, speaking directly with meteorologists, we have a system that we go through. We're in constant communication with, not just our production people, but also with the tours and the artists themselves and it's a big process that goes into, Are we going to delay a show? Are we going to evacuate a show or would we have to cancel the show? I've noticed that a lot of people don't really understand from the outside perspective that we always try to do everything in our power to make sure that a show goes on.
But at the same time, we are in an open-air venue. There is an increased risk, especially thunder and lightning, so we need to make sure that everyone is safe. So sometimes it may seem like there's nothing going on and it's not raining at all. But, in our radar and backstage, we can see that there's really bad lightning within a couple miles of us, so we need to keep safe, and it's an interesting thing to see from an inside perspective. It's something that I wish people kind of understood a little bit better.
My favorite part of the job is the people. I've met so many really cool people and have gotten so many great opportunities through Bethel Woods. Every summer it's a new batch of people coming in, a new batch of people coming out. So while it's always bittersweet to have that turnover, you're always going to have a new person who you're going to connect with and make a new memory with.
During my time in SUNY Fredonia’s music industry program, I created my own music group, Beach Tower. And during the inception of the Horizon Stage in 2022, I was given the opportunity to be one of the performers on the Horizon Stage during the inaugural season. Since then, I've had the opportunity to perform on the Horizon Stage every year. It's another really cool facet of working at Bethel. So starting with Project Identity and getting more comfortable with performance, even if it was just a small group of my friends, taking that from high school into college years and then coming back to Bethel to showcase that years later, was a really, really cool thing.”