Well, the big story for December is obviously last Friday's show with Dugan's Hooligans. We sold out the room for a paid attendance of 202. If the opening act, The Cotillion Singers didn't have 28 member in the group, we might have sold that many additional tickets. The Hooligans fans also stuffed the Creel to the extent that they took the 2nd highest performer's fee on record of $1866, coming in behind only Frank Vignola. At the time of this writing, the December figures have not been posted on Quickbooks, so I can't give you any profit numbers. But the $540 deposit generated by the Hooligans' show indicates that December will show a healthy profit. Assuming the figures get posted before the meeting, I'll have numbers for you then.
The attendance of 64 at Chorus Song Night was pretty healthy (4th best on record) surpassing even last year's with Bill Staines on the performer roster.
The year ended with an average paid attendance for regular shows of 91. Not quite up to the 94 of last year, but last year was exceptional.
I'm anticipating that we will soon have WiFi access at MUF so we will be able to send out the tally sheets directly from the Minstrel laptop, rather than transferring them to a memory stick and sending them out from the head staff's home e-mail.
New bookings in December:
Feb. 24: Rich Deans for his first Feature at the Minstrel, with The Folk Goddesses (including Hilary Foxsong of Gathering Time) as the opener.
March 2: Sharlys Dugan to open for the Nuala Kennedy Band
June 1: AcquAria, an interesting duo that does traditional music of Sicily to open for Beppe Gambetta.
Highlights in January: Vance Gilbert on the 20th. <<...>> <<...>>
Mike Agranoff
Program Chairman
The Minstrel
Morristown, NJ USA