Saturday, March 29, 2008

Vehicle Camping Tickets - On the Way!!

So, the ladies and gents at our local post office know us pretty well. We probably get and send more mail than almost any other businesses in little tiny Trumansburg. We need them to love us, so we try to make their jobs as easy as possible. That's why we sent out the Vehicle Camping Tickets a few at a time. Since we sent them all certified, and each certified letter takes about 60 seconds to process - double that if you're printing out the postage - we didn't want to clog their entire system in one day. So we sent out the vehicle camping tickets in envelope bundles of 20-50, over the course of a couple of weeks. The last ones went out on Friday, March 28. Therefore, you should be seeing them by the following Friday. If you don't, let us know!

Thanks for your continuing patience. We know that you'd all rather prefer us (and the lovely folks at the T-burg Post Office) to handle your tickets directly and save you massive amounts of money in processing fees than to use one of those yucky big corporate ticket conglomerates.

In exchange for your continued patience, we offer you this link - it's a free download to the Chicken Chokers' 2007 GrassRoots Set. Get yer old-time on!

Free Chicken Chokers Download

While you're over there at Funkyside.com, have a look around... they've got tons of amazing and hard-to-find CDs and live shows available!

Monday, March 24, 2008

So You Wanna Be a GrassRoots Intern?

Seeking two extraordinary persons with whom to enter a mutually beneficial business relationship in the Summer of 2008. Simply put: we need interns!

Yes, we're looking for a coupla good college-aged superstars to come and work with us in the GrassRoots Office. One intern will work under the festival executive director, and the other will work under yours truly. The directorial intern will work on the more event-planning-y aspects of the festival, and the marketing intern will work on the more you-should-come-to-our-festival aspects.

They're not going to be menial-labor jobs... well... no more menial than any of the jobs the staff already does; Nana Tickets and I spent the afternoon putting $3.06 worth of stamps, in odd combinations, on envelopes. Festival Director Rosa didn't call "not it" fast enough, so she got stuck picking up lunch. Some of it is glamorous, though (or at least highly entertaining), and the internships will involve a whole lot of that fun stuff.

So, if you've got a lifelong interest in non-profit work, arts management, music publicity, or anything of that sort, and you happen to be a college-aged student, give me a holler at promo@grassrootsfest.org and I'll send you full job descriptions and an application.

Also, the internships are for experience only, but we will do everything we can to make sure that you get academic credit for the work you do here - we're already legit with several regional schools, so it shouldn't be an issue, unless your college has an official policy against awesome non-profits, in which case, you shouldn't go there.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Support the Arts in Tompkins County!

Okay, well, since you're (probably) a GrassRoots Festival patron, you already DO support the arts in Tompkins County, so give yourself a pat on the back. Tompkins County is a pretty unique place. Our population is less than 100,000, but we have 3 independent movie houses, 5 local theatres (the kind that have plays and music), a ton of local clubs and nighttime music venues, several orchestras, dozens of galleries and museums, and tons of unique and amazing festivals. However, it's not necessarily easy to stay afloat as a non-profit arts organization in these here parts. Because there are only a couple of large corporations in Tompkins County, there's not a lot of corporate funding to go into the arts, so many of the local non-profits count on a lot of individual donations to help them make ends meet.

As is often the case with the arts, though, instead of just straight-out begging for money, these local arts organizations have come up with fun and interesting ways to make donations benefit both the gifter and the giftee.

Case in point: The Kitchen Theatre. It's is one of our favorite theatres in the whole world. It's intimate as all get-out (only 73 seats! You really do feel like the plays are happening right in your kitchen!), but they both create and import outstanding works - plays, musicals, avant-garde performance pieces - all with unbelievably talented actors, singers and dancers. It's Broadway-quality theatre, right in Downtown Ithaca. And what's really wonderful about it is that they manage to keep ticket prices at a totally affordable level (unlike theatre in big cities, where decent seats can run you in the hundreds of dollars). Part of the reason that the Kitchen is able to keep ticket prices so low is because of their creative fundraising.

The Kitchen's biggest annual fundraising event is their super-fun Online Auction. Basically, lots of businesses and artisans around town donate goods and services, and you get to bid on them. If you are the highest bidder, the Kitchen gets the money, and you get something awesome to take home. We really do mean awesome. Some of the items up for bid this year are an oil painting by Annie Campbell (who does the artwork for the cover of the GrassRoots program book each year), a pair of tickets to the Light in Winter Festival (a great festival of science and the arts that takes place in Ithaca in January and employs some of the GrassRoots staff during our "off-season"), a 30-minute massage from Peter Sayet (father of Gregor Sayet-Bone, member of GrassRoots Favorites "The Talktomes"), and, yes, a pair of GrassRoots Festival tickets. Dozens of other awesome local stuff, as well.

So please consider helping out with this worthwhile endeavor and heading on over there to bid on something. And hey, maybe we'll see you in the Kitchen soon!

Kitchen Theatre Auction Website