April 26

It's Saturday night and Tuesdays with Morrie is onstage at this moment in performance. Audiences for the second week have picked up a little. Not as large as we were hoping for. Last night and tonight are pretty well sold out. This afternoon was a small audience. We added the Saturday matinees a couple of years ago and we hoped that we would build audiences for those shows. Some Saturday matinees sell very well. Others remain small. It is a continuing quest to see if we can goose up those numbers a little. Next year we are looking at some marketing ideas for the Saturday matinees.

Tickets for the Derby Party are on sale and starting to pick up. We added a group sale price ($35 a ticket) to the tickets after a couple of inquiries about groups of 15 or more. Individual tickets for the event are priced at $40. I had never thought of adding a group price for a fundraiser before but I was doing some research this week on a special fundraising event from another theatre and saw it in their group sale brochure. It seemed like a good idea.

Bill Ford wrote a wonderful letter to the editor of the Paducah Sun that was printed Thursday. It is so nice to have such positive support from Bill and others like him in the community.

Yesterday I drew out the form of the tree for Zink. It is different than I thought it was going to be but I like it better than my original idea. I've added a second branch and Jim went ahead and added a third branch to see if I liked it. It is a very symbolic tree look and I think will go well with the show. Tech rehearsal is a week from tomorrow. ( The day after the Derby Party) I was cast at the last minute in the role of the father for Zink. I'm supposed to be off book by Monday. That means I can't carry my script with me anymore. I guess I'll be studying lines tomorrow after the cast party for Tuesdays with Morrie.

Janice came in last night and has worked all day today on the costumes for Zink. I can hear the radio above my head as I write this. (The costume shop is directly above my head).

I've spent the last couple of days reading books on board of director policies and structure trying to look at different ways to help our board with some of the challenges it faces. It is like reading a text book filled with tech-speak. Jargon that only people who are involved with boards on a regular basis would use. Even though I sometimes act as a board consultant for other non-profit groups I still find the language hard to follow sometimes.

We are down to the last two months of our fiscal year. This is usually where we really start to hurt if we haven't achieved our income goals. Every year we do a pretty good job of staying at or below our expense spending. It is always the income side that makes me lose sleep. Weather can play havoc with the box office for a show. Our fundraisers sometimes fall below our projected goals. Membership contributions and sponsorships all are the things that can make or break the theatres fiscal year. We are struggling to meet our membership goal this year as people are still giving but many have pulled back a little. Our ad sales representative is out in the community selling program ads for next season and we've had a couple of companies who were long time advertisers drop out totally. The good thing is some new advertisers are taking advantage of prime ad space in our programs and stepping up.

This is time of year that we start looking at maintenance projects we had scheduled at the beginning of the year and decide if they will happen or get pushed back until next season. If you see me looking a little frazzled its due to budget numbers running in my head. The shows are going great. That is always a positive that keeps me smiling when things start to look gloomy.