I have learned a few things about Florida weather in the last three years, and the most important one is that the radar lies to you in a very specific way. It shows you a solid wall of red, all marching in from the Gulf, all due to hit exactly where you've told sixty people to come meet you. And then, nine times out of ten, the wall stops half a mile from the shore, stares at the beach for about forty minutes, and then turns around and goes somewhere else. The tenth time it doesn't. Guess which time our second sunset was.
It was September 2024. The sunset was supposed to start at 7 pm. By 1 pm the sky over downtown Fort Myers was the color of an old bruise and my phone was going off with weather alerts every ninety seconds. Tony and I sat in the van on Estero Boulevard, staring at the radar together, and for about twelve minutes we genuinely thought we were going to have to refund the whole show.
Here is what saved us. We had already promised everybody that this night was going to happen. Not in a marketing sense — in a personal sense. We had hand-delivered headsets to two older couples down the street who didn't trust emails. We'd saved a spot for a guy whose daughter had flown in from Ohio. We'd told a woman whose wife had passed in the spring that this was going to be her first night out in six months. Somewhere around 2 pm, Tony turned to me in the van and said, 'We can't cancel this. We can delay it. But we can't cancel it.'
So we didn't. We moved doors from 7 to 8:15 and sent the most terrifying email blast of my life — 'we are WATCHING the radar, stand by, do not drive out yet.' And then we waited. The storm hit the coast at 3 pm. It was bad. There was standing water on Estero Boulevard at 4. At 5 the rain started thinning. At 6:30 the clouds split open over the Gulf and the most absurd, technicolor, prop-comedy-level pink sky rolled in from the west like somebody had ordered it from a catalog. We opened doors at 8:15. 56 of the 60 people showed up. Tony opened his set with a track called 'Come Back, Stranger' and I still can't listen to it without tearing up.
What I learned that night is that the right word for a cancelled event is 'almost.' Almost is a magic word. 'We almost didn't have this night.' 'We almost went home.' 'We almost missed it.' When you put 'almost' in front of a thing, the thing itself becomes brighter. I've been chasing that feeling ever since. I don't want Casamoré nights to feel inevitable. I want them to feel barely saved. I want you to walk in thinking we almost didn't do this, and I want you to walk out saying we can't believe we did.
So the next time the radar goes red and your phone starts yelling at you six hours before a Casamoré sunset — and it will, because this is Florida — know that we are in a van somewhere on Estero Boulevard looking at the same screen, and we are almost certainly going to find a way to make the night happen anyway. That's the deal. That's the house rule. Almost is a word we work for.