Why "ChesterFest"?

The first thing you need to know is that C.B. stands for Chester Bror. Hence, ChesterFest.

As best I can remember, the term "ChesterFest" was coined by my buddy Brian Murray back in 1999. We were working at Central Park Media and I'd decided I was going to leave the company. Usually when something like this happened and an employee was leaving on good terms, CPM always threw them a going away party. But Brian deemed that I had worked there too long and too hard to be sent off with just a single night of drinking, so he took it upon himself to organize an entire week of drunken debauchery. He dubbed this week of getting wasted "ChesterFest" and from what we can remember, it went down in the books as a historical event that CPMers still love to talk about.

Fast forward to April 2005 when I made the decision to quit Marvel. I began telling people I was leaving and everyone immediately started asking about the farewell bash. So the planning committee was put into action. Then Brian Murray gets wind of the news and his immediate reaction was "Dude, when's ChesterFest 2"? I'd forgotten all about the term at this point but the Marvel guys loved it and decided it was a go. We just needed a subtitle for it, like Electric Boogaloo, and sitting at Mulligan's over beers one night Andy Schmidt blurted out "The Bror Uproar", so there it was: ChesterFest 2: The Bror Uproar. Over the course of my last week at Marvel, we ate and drank and danced and partied. (Well, some people danced.) And when it was all over, I thought I wouldn't hear the name again for at least another five years.

Then I started my self-imposed term of unemployment. Everyone kept calling to check in and ask how I was doing, which I appreciated. They wanted to know what I was up to, how was I spending my days. I found I kept telling the same stories over and over. Finally someone said "You must get sick of repeating yourself all day. Why not start a blog?". So I did. But as I researched blogs and spoke with friends about them (Thanks for all the help, Layman!), I realized that most of the ones I visited had clever names - The Beat, Gelomatti, Channel Surfing... so calling mine The C.B. Cebulski Blog seemed pretty lame. The brainstorming began and I came up with all kinds of crazy names for mine, trying to play with variations of C.B. or something that rhymed with "ski", but nothing worked. Then one day, Mutsumi, my wife, finally downloads the pictures from her digital camera and there were a bunch of shots from my final going away party at the Irish Rogue. She sends me over one of me, MacKenzie Cadenhead and Mike Marts and they're both wearing these custom ChesterFest T-shirts they had made. (Maybe one day I'll post it but I have to make sure they're cool with it first.) Upon seeing that pic, something just clicked. Without sounding too self-absorbed here, ChesterFest was a week that was all about me, and I figured that this blog was pretty much gonna be all about me, right? The name made sense. So right then and there the ChesterFest blog was named and born!

Bored yet?