The swelling didn’t stop at his nose

SANFORD, FL–When Sandra Erving started her event planning business, Bigger Than It Even Deserves, six years ago, her main focus was on providing a service that would provide flexibility for a variety of events.  For Erving, that flexibility has come from thinking outside the box from day one.

“The day I graduated from event planning school, I started looking at the kinds of events that weren’t getting the promotion they deserve,” Erving explains, “Riots were a no-brainer.  They always draw a crowd.  But I realized that, while riots happen all the time, not everybody hears about them.  I set out to change that.”

Erving first launched the riot organizing branch of her company when she convinced a group of inmates at the Florida State Prison to come together to protest when HBO was removed from the cable feed in their cells.  After a five day standoff in which two prison guards were held hostage and three prisoners were beat to death, she knew she was off and running.

“One thing I knew right away was that I had to start small,” Erving says, “A prison riot is going to be contained, and I knew that.  But it gave me a pretty good sample size of what to expect.  I could see we were onto an untapped source.”

The past few weeks Erving has been working around the clock preparing for what she believes could be the largest endeavor in her young company’s existence.  With tensions high as a global audience awaits the outcome of George Zimmerman’s trial in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, Erving has been quietly laying the groundwork for, potentially, the greatest riot of all time.

See?

“Could this be bigger than Rodney King?  Absolutely,” Erving says, “A guy killing an unarmed black kid?  Are you shitting me?  That’s a riot gold mine.  And who cares that Zimmerman isn’t a real white guy?  So what if he’s Hispanic, or half-Jewish, or whatever the hell the guy is?  He’s a guy of authority who shot an unarmed black teenager.  Black America expects this guy to get what he has coming.  And when it doesn’t happen, that just looks like dollar signs to me.”

Erving says the only thing that could have made a potential Zimmerman acquittal more lucrative to her business is if the admitted killer had been white, but she will take what she can get.

“If Rodney King happened today, with Twitter and Facebook and all the social media bullshit, I could retire tomorrow,” she says, “But this is the next best thing.  A lot of black families probably haven’t even seen Zimmerman’s mugshot.  They think a Jew killed an unarmed black kid.  If this acquittal happens, you can call me Ms. Erving from now on.”