It’s a contest! I’m giving local Boston-area Twitterers a chance to win a fabulous evening full of fun and good food.  (Or, non-local too if you can get yourself to Waltham, MA on April 7th on your own!)  Hoping you all can help me publicize a good cause in return.

Can you Tweet about the upcoming festival?  Can we declare it an un-official tweet-up?  Or, even an official one?  I’ll be there — see you there too?

The Contest: Just Tweet to Win!  Make up your own tweet about the contest OR about the Festival to win and include this link (http://go2.vg/WalFest), and I’ll randomly pick one twitterer to win a pair of tickets.   Enter as many times as you like!  Just include the link.  Here are some tweet ideas — use one of these or make up your own:

“@Bobbiec Win tickets to Waltham Food and Wine Festival benefit 4/7.  Tweet  with this link to win: http://go2.vg/WalFest”

“@Bobbiec Support Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation by going to Food & Wine Festival. Win Tix by tweeting http://go2.vg/WalFest”

“@Bobbiec is giving away tix to the Waltham Food & Wine Festival. Win Tix by re-tweeting http://go2.vg/WalFest”

The details: The Waltham Food and Wine Festival is an annual event held to support the Charles River Museum of Industry, a certified non-profit. (www.crmi.org)

Yup, it’s my pet project (or one of them anyway.) I’ve been involved in the Museum for the last several years – it’s an eclectic place, an old mill building full of machinery, gears, cogs, turbines, watches and a group of volunteers who bring with them their love of all things mechanical and industrial. There’s a real working machine shop and a loom and cars and a fire engine and much more.  Right now, the featured exhibit is about antique bikes.  Totally cool stuff — check it out, the Museum is open Thursday, Friday and Saturdays.  This past Saturday there was a special event, the Model Engineering Show.  The lecture series is a good one too.

Often something is missing in our virtual worlds — “real” stuff. I’ve watched my kids get immersed in activities at the museum and learn things they have little chance of learning elsewhere. Think about it, in our electronic world of bits and bytes  kids rarely have the chance to get their hands dirty and learn about how stuff works.

The History: The museum is housed in the Francis Cabot Lowell mill building, right off Moody Street (restaurant row) in Waltham, MA.  Not far from Boston, the mill is the site of the original manufacturing company (The Boston Manufacturing Company) in America. At a time when manufacturing and industry is struggling, this mill is there to remind us of how American workers first banded together to work for real wages and to make a consistent product. It is especially significant to me and other working women as the place where young women first worked for wages paid in cash.  The “Mill Girls” left their homes and, for the first time in American history, earned a measure of independence along with their wages.

It could also be considered the birthplace of the venture capital or angel capital system: the Boston Manufacturing Company was the FIRST large successful manufacturing company in the United States. It raised more than $400,000 from investors to develop buildings and machinery. The BMC was the prototype of the modern corporation.The first industrial labor strike in the United States was in this mill in 1821. The protesters were women, and the issue was wages.

The Party: Waltham is well-known for Moody Street’s restaurants — you can find an endless variety there.  The Waltham Food and Wine festival allows you to try quite a few of them, all in one place, for less than you would probably spend on a visit to one !! (Already, more than a dozen restaurants are signed up.)  And, one of the area’s best wine merchants is pouring wines to go with the food.  You also get a chance to win raffle prizes and bid on an assortment of fantastic items in the silent auction.  Tickets are $45/$40 if you order ahead of time by calling the museum at 781-893-5410. For more info on the museum:  http://www.crmi.org

Twitter contest deadline: March 2, 2009