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December is always a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty situation. It's pre-destined to look bad, because we typically have only 3 shows in the month, and two of them are predictably low-attendance: Chorus Song Night and Open Stage. With that in mind, I can happily say that December wasn't nearly as bad as it could have beenJ. The savior, of course was the December 27 show with an all-out blow-out with the Shockenaw Mountain Boys and Diane Perry. It was a sell-out crowd--The best possible kind of sellout: We only had to turn away 3 people. 182 paid, and Shockenaw broke well into the Comma Club with a fee of $1684. So when I report that we only lost $138 for the month, I'm pretty pleased. Last December we lost $329. For the year of 2013, we averaged 81.8 paid for regular shows and 70.8 for all shows including Open Stages and the like. Our overall profit for the year of $820 is still pretty disappointing, but we'll shoot for better in 2014.
The energy at the Shockenaw show was very high, in no small part due to the presence of a 5-person video crew from New Jersey Public Television, which video-recorded the entire evening, to be edited down to a 10-or-so-minute segment for their NJ State Of The Arts program. It will be broadcast sometime late in January. We'll put out a special notice by email as soon as we have the info. There were over 25 first-timers at that show, attracted both by Shockenaw's mailing list, and a lot of press coverage. (Thanks, Publicity Crew!). And the commentary from the first-timers was all very positive. I'm confident we'll see a lot of them back again.
There was one small dark spot in the December 27 show: In moving some of the stuff on stage to set up, our Sound Crew accidently damaged a cheap end-table that is kept on stage. We reported the damage immediately, and Bill Henderson repaired the damage. We'll see if anything ensues from that. I don't expect anything particularly disastrous to come of it.
New bookings in December:
March 7: Low 'n Lonesome: A ragtime & blues guitar duet to open for Andy Cohen
April 25: Spuyten Duyvil
May 30: Rich Deans
June 20 (Perhaps to move to a different date): FP expatriots Liza & AJ
September 19: comedic trio Modern Man, reconstituted and performing again.
Highlights for January:
Jan 10: Tom Chapin
Jan 24: Jean Rohe & the End Of The World Show
Mike Agranoff
Program Chair
The Minstrel Acoustic Concert Series
Morristown, NJ 07960, USA
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