KEY POINTS:
There's nothing like watching a full-throated lady doing strange things with a sword and a cucumber followed by an acrobat playing human soap on a rope above an antique bathtub, to induce the festival spirit.
A lunchtime preview in the Auckland Festival's Spiegeltent yesterday did it for me.
My guess is the near-two-hour-long free fireworks extravaganza by French pyrotechicians Groupe F in the Domain tomorrow night may do the trick for the rest of you.
Festival organisers are hoping so, because we Aucklanders are playing our traditional waiting game and leaving ticket buying tickets for AK07 to the last moment.
Mind you, if Aucklanders aren't fully focused on our festival in the way Wellingtonians embrace theirs, it's not all our fault. Other festival-town councils become single-mindedly one-tracked months before the big event.
But in Auckland, the festival's main backer, the Auckland City Council, has gone to the other extreme and is proudly also promoting and funding competing events - the Auckland Arts Triennial and Pasifika Festival. The opening day for all three is today.
No doubt the city council will say the three festivals are complementary, not competing. But if that is so, why isn't there joint marketing and combined organisational structures to ensure better value for the public dollar and create more opportunities for cross-pollination of ideas?
Don't get me wrong. Who could not be delighted at the depth and variety of events in this third festival of the current era. When we consider how far the programme has come since AK03, the anorexic first event, we can only admire the determination and hard work of pioneers like Victoria Carter, Scott Milne and Simon Prast and of present chief executive David Malacari.
But now the Auckland Festival seems securely established once more as a feature of the city's cultural life, what better time to debate its development and direction than over the next three weeks.
What we culture vultures should be doing for starters is taking a leaf out of the sporting jocks' book and talking up the economic significance of festivals.
Maybe we could even adopt Trevor Mallard as the new arts minister. As Sports Minister he has only to hear of a game of international tiddlywinks and he's toting up million dollars of economic bonanza for New Zealand and offering grants accordingly.
He claims the Rugby World Cup will pull in 70,000 extra tourists and generate a $500 million economic benefit. The 2010 World Rowing Championships will bring in $100 million, V8 Supercars $20 million a year.
Using Mr Mallard's team of accountants, it shouldn't be hard to come up with similar economic benefit figures for an Auckland Festival - particularly one that embraced the largest Pacific Island festival in the world. Imagine the tens of thousands of cruise ship passengers and the millions of dollars and yen we could conjure up for grant-seeking reports if we were to push the unique Polynesian side.
Some of the claims could even be true. Arts festivals do put cities on the map. Edinburgh, the original festival city, is proof of that, voted No 1 European destination for the past six years. And 10 years on, Singapore's art festival is starting to make that city into something more than just a duty-free, plane-changing stop-over.
European Union countries vie for a turn as Capital of Culture. Two recent title-holders - Glasgow and Cork - were transformed by the government and EU money that poured in and the tourist and theatre-going income that followed.
Luxembourg is the lucky Capital of Culture next year and is budgeting $90 million of its own money and more than $200 million of EU and corporate backing.
We can only dream of figures like this. But it's proof that elsewhere, art and culture are seen as creators of economic growth. And unlike sporting world cups and Olympic Games, arts festivals can return to a city as often as its people want.
