I read this earlier this morning:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/134637734_act20.html
By the way… “Lutego 20, 2003” ??
I was about to post a link to that same Seattle Times article.
$40,000. Can you believe it?
That’s about 2/3 of Annex’s annual budget, and it was pulled from the pockets of the board members to begin the attempt to bail ACT out of a $2 million debt. Jesus, just let that damn theater drown in its own vomit and send the money to companies capable of doing ambitious work in the black.
Oh, if only that was what would happen!
Unfortunately, the reality is that even if ACT does go belly up, very little if any of the corporate or grant funding they would have been eligible for will ever trickle its way down to the fringe level. Everybody’s cutting back on donations, and I’d wager corporate donations will simply not be allocated at all, given the tight economy, or in the case of granting authorities redistributed to the other major players. And a substantial portion of that $1.5 mm represents money they OWE to local businesses, which means it’s going to be even harder to convince them to provide goods or services to other arts orgs — once burned, twice shy, as they say.
Of course, even if just a tiny fraction DOES make it down here to the lower depths (for the purposes of comparison, the $48,000 raised to date — not including the original promise of $270,000 — represents only 3.33% of the amount they need to pay off the $1.5 mm debt), for us it’ll still be a substantial amount, however much it turns out to be.
Lutego. Polish for February.
Well, we’ve known things weren’t going well over there, just didn’t know they were as bad as this.