Months of training, plotting, planning, and taste testing went into creating what is known to FSG Austin as “The Mudbug Madness.” Sure, some may call it a Crawfish Boil and be on their way, but you can’t cook up 350 lbs. of crawfish, 250 ears of corn, 60 lbs. of mushrooms, 50 lbs. of jalapenos, 300 links of sausage, 60 lbs. of boudin sausage, 300 hotdogs, and loads of potatoes and just call it a crawfish boil. That’s madness! That’s why it’s lovingly called the Mudbug Madness.
For the young ones, three kinds of bounce houses, Icee freeze pops, and a bin of live crawfish were the highlight of their day. Bean bag toss, washers, basketball, a DJ, and the spectacle of that much crawfish kept everyone else entertained.
Not only was the event entertaining, but one of our FSG employees was blown away by the generosity and fraternity of his fellow peers at this event: “One thing that really struck a cord with me is that despite all of the hard work and preparation already undertaken to pull off an event of this magnitude they additionally organized a raffle to raise funds to go to an FSG employee. There were about 7 or 8 items on the raffle table that were pulled together from FSG staff either through personal collection contribution or purchase and raffled at $10 per ticket. At the time of the raffle drawing the DDLM staff first live auctioned off their limited edition Mudbug T-shirts and then started drawing tickets. This is where it really inspired the heart…. As winners were drawn, and called to collect their prize, many of the good people who work for FSG said that they wanted their winning item to go to the live auction block to yet again continue to raise more funds. WOW!! In all, I overheard they raised close to $2500.”
This year, our Mudbug Madness landed on Cinco de Mayo, so the shirt design for all the hard-working volunteers playfully reflected “Dia de los Mudbug.” What may look like a simple event from the outside actually took 20+ volunteers, 12 hours prep and cooking on Saturday, and 5 hours of cleanup on Sunday. The Sunday cleanup ended with a family-style breakfast as everyone reminisced on the previous day’s activities and hilarious missteps. The most popular opinion was that the 2018 Mudbug Madness was one of the best ever. Thank you to everyone who volunteered and everyone who came out! #TeamFSG