Entertainment Committee

The Entertainment Committee was one of the several elected committees that governed the Weedpatch government camp, a model Farm Security Administration facility where the migrant families policed themselves. While the Central Committee made the camp's laws and the Ladies' Committee oversaw sanitation and welfare, the Entertainment Committee was charged with the vital task of providing amusement for a people starved for pleasure. In the camps along the roads, the migrant people "looked always for pleasure, dug for pleasure, manufactured pleasure, and they were hungry for amusement." The committee's most important function was organizing the Saturday night dance, a weekly event that drew families from the camp and guests from the surrounding countryside, creating a temporary world of community and joy. The string band would play, and the people would gather, their faces intent and excited, to dance the square dances and forget, for a few hours, the grinding poverty and hostility of their lives. The committee, therefore, was not merely an organizer of entertainment but a cultivator of the communal spirit that made the camp a haven of dignity and self-respect in a hostile state.