Islander Sheila Hughes is producer for Labor Day’s arts spectacle.

Sheila Hughes’ job is way cool.

As producer of the annual Bumbershoot festival, the island resident modestly “oversees the larger brushstrokes” of an event that will bring some 200,000 fans to Seattle Center this weekend for marquee music and arts talent and up-and-coming acts.

Does she know how good she has it?

“Every single day,” Hughes muses, “as I’m breaking into my Advil for the millionth time.”

The sardonic response comes just days before the festival is to open its gates; her office has gone “nutso” in preparation for the four-day, $4 million production.

Even the comparative respite of an interview is punctuated by the comings and goings of staffers with this bit of indispensible information or that.

But at its most hectic, the One Reel office – a warren of cubes in a funky building on Westlake North – radiates some serious hipness.

A giant portrait of Bob Marley hangs on the conference room wall; “Seattle casual” is the mode of the day, and the environment veritably thrums with creativity.

“It’s a non-stop cocktail party atmosphere around here during Bumbershoot,” Hughes says, “without the cocktails, unfortunately.”

Her formal title is vice president for communications of One Reel, a 30-year-old non-profit organization that began as a traveling theater troupe, and eventually “morphed into an arts presenter with a penchant for unusual offerings and public spectacle.”

Hughes – who describes herself as “a fan of talent, but not a talent myself” – moved to Seattle from Chicago in 1985 to be part of a burgeoning theater scene. Her Windy City days included a five-year stint doing PR for stage groups, the Chicago Ballet and Chamber Music Chicago.

She answered a newspaper ad for a six-month position as PR director with One Reel, which at that time had but nine employees and occupied what she describes as “a hole in the wall in the embarrassing part of downtown.”

The “temporary” job proved otherwise, and Hughes eventually became one of seven company principals and One Reel’s maven of marketing.

The staff has grown seven-fold since she signed on. And along the way, One Reel took over permanent stewardship of Bumbershoot, relieving the city of Seattle of its annual financial worries over an event that had grown beyond municipal understanding or control.

Current One Reel fare includes the Summer Nights at the Pier music series, July 4 fireworks over Gasworks Park, and ongoing runs of the madcap Teatro Zinzanni in Seattle and San Francisco. The productions act as mutual safety nets, so a bad stretch for one is usually covered by the successes of others.

But Bumbershoot – for which hundreds of islanders ferry across the water each year, in an end-of-summer ritual – is its signature show. And despite its four-day run, the event is an all-year sucker.

In fact, work on next year’s Bumbershoot will begin later this month, “when everyone can form a sentence again.”

“Everybody walks around shellshocked for a few weeks,” Hughes says, “then they start sharing anecdotes, and that’s how the planning starts.”

The ‘Shoot

One can only guess at many aspects of the Bumbershoot logistics – arranging transportation, lodging and food for the festival talent; hiring some 2,000 temporary laborers, concessionaires, escorts, technicians and security workers.

But the magnitude of the undertaking can be gauged in an obscure, inches-thick document called the Event Service Order.

The tome – every detail of which must be approved by Seattle Center before it will relinquish control of the 74-acre grounds – comes down from the mount anew for each year’s production.

It details everything from food-booth sinks to computer and phone lines to parking spaces to pallets of ice.

“We measure our life,” Hughes says, “in thousands of tie wraps and dozens of airport pickups, pounds of ice and hundreds of yards of twinkle lights.”

Sometimes, planning runs into physical changes on the Seattle Center grounds. The festival recently lost use of a prime venue for a year, as the venerable opera house was remodeled into a Monument to the Largesse of a Wealthy Family Hall; plans had to be made for other stages, which were then rendered irrelevant the following season.

The whole process is called “building the village” – two weeks to set up, five days to take down – and the blueprint is the ESO.

“If anyone wanted to read it, they’d know how to put on Bumbershoot physically,” Hughes says, “if not spiritually.”

The spiritual part – that would include the process by which 1,000 hopeful musicians, artists, poets, filmmakers and other performers are winnowed down to the 125 or so acts that can be reasonably managed and presented each day.

Aspirants submit applications to One Reel in March; volunteer juries decide which acts make the cut.

Under the eyes of Hughes’ programmers, the list of talent is confirmed. Her people get back to their people; invert the process and repeat it over the course of a month, and the festival bill takes shape.

Bumbershoot, Hughes says, is a creature of great introspection, constantly looking for new themes to keep pace with changing public tastes. Focus groups and marketing efforts seek out new fans, as advancing age inevitably turns others off to the festival experience.

And, as she notes, it is a crowded field for the entertainment eye, ear and dollar. Whereas Seattle clubs once ceded the scene to Bumbershoot for the weekend, the festival now competes with rock outlets, regional amphitheaters, wineries and some of One Reel’s own productions.

Yet it has but one natural enemy: rain. Nothing dampens the festival atmosphere – and the gate – like inclement weather, which drives down attendance and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“You build it as well as you can, and then you hope that the weather gods smile on you for those four days,” Hughes says. “That’s kind of the farmer in us.”

Sheila Hughes’ job is way cool, but it comes with one certain drawback: her work doesn’t end when Bumbershoot begins. Since moving with her family to Bainbridge Island in 1997, she has given up coming home during the festival, finding the two worlds too disparate for her mind to reconcile. She just stays in Seattle.

And while you’re soaking up the sounds of REM or Bonnie Raitt or De La Soul or Daniel Lanois, she will be flitting from venue to venue, troubleshooting glitches and making sure One Reel has once again managed to pull the whole spectacle off.

“I’m looking forward to the year I can go as a fan,” Hughes says, “and just walk around with my daughter and say, ‘Let’s go see this, let’s go see that.’”

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Sheila on the ‘Shoot:

“What amazes me is that it still exists at all. If you decided to make a Bumbershoot from scratch – let’s say, create this thing in another city without any of the history or personality in place – there is very little about it that makes sense.

“Why would you cram one place with so many things, from dancing penguins to breakdancers to poets to punk rockers? That defies marketing logic. And why would you put it on Labor Day, and have it outdoors where it’s vulnerable to weather? Idiotic from a business standpoint. And why would you charge so little for the experience, when all over the country people are paying $50 for baseball games and $8 for a beer?

“And in a world of virtual experiences where everyone is watching screens all day long, why build something that exists only as a live event – not broadcast, televised, web-cammed, or pre-packaged?

“It’s the complete illogical aspect of Bumbershoot that I think is its greatest attribute. It defies every rule of conventional thinking. The fact that there’s still a place for people to get together and experience something new, live, transforming, odd and amazing, that’s what I love.”