The Spring continues merrily along it’s path. I was really bummed when last week’s attendance was lack-lustre for the Honey Badgers, but the rest of the nights have been as packed as we are willing to pack them for the last couple of months. Last week we ALSO increased our capacity to 30 in recognition of slowly-declining COVID rates (and in recognition of how far we have to go yet, it’s good to note that we’re still at something like one quarter the Before Times room capacity!).
In any case, this week things felt a lot better, at least for the beginning of the evening, missing maxed capacity by one, which, since we had a special guest photographer, kinda worked out in any case. Unfortunately 1/3 of that population was one group of performers and students who showed up late and left shortly after performing – which was pretty crappy. I get that they’re school kids, but we might have to clamp down on that in the future since that means turning away people who, frankly, would’ve been there for our feature (the incredible Eli Lev) and the remainder of our list. The room really looked kinda empty by the end of the night, which always sucks.
So, the advance signup and the reduced capacity continues to throw challenges at us – and the next couple of weeks I’m actually going to be away, trying to make sense of all that stuff remotely, so who knows HOW it’ll shape up. Doug and the museum are trying to come up with some other solutions to allowing plenty of audience bookings while NOT overbooking performance slots, but so far this has been woefully over-complicated.
I just dream that we’ll get it all sorted out before our funding runs out, so it feels as if we get to end while looking like we knew what we were doing!
