Does General Conference have an aspect that is carnivalesque, unpredictable, dangerous, and so on?

Oh, it’s got a freaky-holiday air to it, but more in the Simon and Garfunkel sense than in the carnivale/fasching close-to-the-edge danger zone. There are things Mormons do well; danger and carnivalesque are not among them.

That said, it’s an intersting thought…

Because of our structure–stakes, wards, families, we tend to divide our celebrations into subsets. We have a stake picnic, ward parties, FHEs. On the Church-wide level, GC is really it–with slightly smaller subsets of Spanish-speaking conferences (filled with music not normally sung in our chapels), and, more recently, our 30th celebration of the Priesthood Revelation. The Genesis Group did extend that one by sponsoring a Genesis picnic right before the commemoration, but it’s nothing like Feast Day.

Some people get very drunk and the kinds of things you might expect from large numbers of inebriated people happen.

This also happens in Utah on conference weekend. Lots of people go to Lake Powell and watch conference on their boat, or at least they say they do. But there are also lots of jet-skiers and boaters who have a full cooler on board.

For my family, conference was literally a feast day. We’d gather at my aunt’s house (they had cable, we didn’t) and just be happily together in the living room. The moms would be in the kitchen (adjacent), spending the whole time preparing a huge, delicious brunch, and then a huge, delicious feast of a dinner.