Fiscal Court and Cinderella

I have been working hard this past week culminating today with a meeting at 11:30 am with Basil Drossos and Brian Laczko, Darlene Dryer, May Louise Zumwalt, Landee Bryant, Julie Harris, and Michael Crouse where we worked out a formula for a unified ask of the McCracken County Fiscal Court for funding. This was a difficult task because each group had individually asked the City of Paducah for funding. The McCracken County Court asked us to present it as one unified voice for funding. We looked at the local tax return on the arts and culture organizations investment and found out that it was 17%. We took half of that return, 8.5%, and rounded that down to 7%. Then we asked the County to fund half of that or 3.5% of the organizations total operating expenses. Last year organizations received on the average about 7% of our operating expenses in funding from the city of Paducah. some organizations received a much larger percentage of budget and others a much smaller percentage. Hopefully this formula will work out the inequities in that request format. Basil Drossos did a great job tonight at the fiscal court meeting as a neutral presenter of our proposal. The Fiscal court asked lots of good questions and we discussed how the economy has impacted all of the organizations. Hopefully the fiscal court will be able to find some money for funding our request and hopefully the city will be able to do the same. The funding we might receive will make the difference between operating at a loss and breaking even. This year MHT eliminated a staff position because of a reduced funding from the Kentucky Arts Council and a drop in corporate sponsors. Many of our long time sponsors had to drop to lower levels of support due to the loss of income in their corporate spending. Hopefully 2010 will see a little better economy. We have seen small signs of growth in our ticket sales for this current year.

Cinderella is onstage (finally) We had a murder mystery and the McCracken County Gifted Talented show in the theatre after Wedding Belles closed. The Cinderella company had been rehearsing across the street in the classroom waiting to move onstage.

April had a rehearsal tonight of The Way Home which is a spoken opera written by Constance Alexander. She has a group of terrific actresses line up to do the benefit performance of the show on Saturday May 22 at 7:30 pm. All proceeds will go to help Sarah Roush with her medical costs.

I got in a couple of scripts from various publishing houses. I had great hopes for the 80's Prom show which was styled on the lines of Tony N Tina's Wedding. Unfortunately the majority of the cast is in their 20's play teenagers. It's fun to do a show like that which goes back in time and you get to relive your Prom. We had a large group of actors in their 20's and 30's when we did Tony N Tina's Wedding. Now most of our actors are under 20 and older than 40. We need more performers in their 20's in order to do a show like 80's Prom Night.

Story Theatre's The Pied Piper kicks off again tomorrow with a performance at Morgan Elementary at 9 am tomorrow morning. You can tell it's getting close to the end of the school year.

MHT will participate again this year in the Fred Paxton Fund Run for Charities. Our goal is to raise $10,000 and get matched that amount. If we can do that we should be close to $100,000 in our endowment. We are also working to kick off a planned giving society. This would be a society that features the names of those in our community which have named Market House Theatre in their will. Look for more details about the fund run and the society in the next newsletter coming out soon.