New Date For Folsom Street Fair

Peter LaBarbera's favorite freak festival is changing its date for the first time in decades. Blame Larry Ellison.

Next year's fair will take place Sunday, September 23. Organizers opted to move the festival, which draws hundreds of thousands of people each year, to avoid a scheduling conflict with Oracle OpenWorld, which will run September 30 through October 4. Demetri Moshoyannis, executive director of Folsom Street Events, which produces the fair, said the group first realized the potential need for a change when it learned that approximately 30,000 hotel room nights had already been booked around their desired dates. "We were told only weeks after this year's fair that nearly the entire inventory of hotel rooms for the city had been sold out for the last weekend of September 2012. So, we were faced with a decision: either move the 2012 fair date and risk upsetting some people who had booked way in advance or not move the fair date, knowing that tens of thousands of visitors would be unable to book rooms at all," he said in a statement.