Take yer medicine

Posted October 4th, 2003 by Sean Williams

Ah, the highs and lows. Or rather, the ups and downs.

We needed to sell ten tickets a night in order to pay for the space, and we needed to sell about twice that in order to make money. We averaged about 22-23 tickets sold a night, and more like 26-27 people seeing the show with comps.

We have one more weekend (provided we don’t move the show) and there was some concern that we would be able to sustain the pace that the rest of the show had. As of right now, we’ve sold out completely tonight and we have about 25 reservations for tomorrow. If we sell out the show both nights, we will have sold as many tickets the last weekend as we did the rest of the run.

More on that in a second. I got food poisoning last night. It’s amazing how you know what it is, you recognize it immediately, once you’ve had it once. You think you have the flu, you think you have a fever, you suddenly realize you’re exhausted, and then you start with the barfing. Once everything is out of your system, you feel a little but better.

Mac called, we talked for a minute, he expressed concern, and then we had a classic moment. “I mean, I just want you to be good in the play tomorrow, I don’t really care how you’re feeling.” “Sure, yeah, well, let’s be honest, no matter how sick I am , I’m still going to be amazing in the show tomorrow, I wouldn’t worry about it.”

If people give you what you pay for, you gotta pay ’em back in kind.

So, for the show, there is a tendency to want to somehow milk this cow while she’s still walking to the barn. We will have covered our costs, which is unfortunately a huge success to us, but we covered our costs because we aimed right with this show. We knew we could get 150 or so people to come see the show, and we will have ended up right around that.

So, although there is the sense that we want to extend the show, the fact is that we can’t unless someone outside our actual PR circle comes in and wants to move it. Unless someone else who thinks they can get another five hundred people to see it wants to move the show, there’s no reason to move it.

One idea is to take it to Napa for a week, play in one of the smaller venues out there and stay at my Dad’s. But even that’s really sketchy.

The one good thing is that the show is ours, totally. We own the set pieces and the costumes, we own the play and the actors. We don’t have to pass it by anyone but ourselves. I mean, if there was *any* chance of the show moving, we would drag John along.