Joe Patti

I have been writing Butts in the Seats (BitS) on topics of arts and cultural administration since 2004 (yikes!). Given the ever evolving concerns facing the sector, I have yet to exhaust the available subject matter. In addition to BitS, I am a founding contributor to the ArtsHacker (artshacker.com) website where I focus on topics related to boards, law, governance, policy and practice. I am also an evangelist for the effort to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture being helmed by Arts Midwest and the Metropolitan Group. (http://www.creatingconnection.org/about/) My most recent role was as Executive Director of the Grand Opera House in Macon, GA. Among the things I am most proud are having produced an opera in the Hawaiian language and a dance drama about Hawaii's snow goddess Poli'ahu while working as a Theater Manager in Hawaii. Though there are many more highlights than there is space here to list.

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Emergency Planning

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I had a meeting today with all the other theatre managers in the University of Hawaii system about emergency procedures. It was very informative in many respects.

I discovered I was in better shape than I thought because the Director of Administrative Services had requested I make up emergency procedures about 9 months ago. Other theatres didn’t have as strong a plan as I did and didn’t make fire exit announcements at the beginning of each show. (It isn’t a law in Hawaii as it is in places like NY. Some people make announcements directing people to the restrooms and were a little embarrassed to realize they didn’t think about fire exits.)

On the other hand some of the other theatres had stronger usher training programs than I currently do so there was a lot everyone could learn from the session.

While the organization that accredits community colleges doesn’t accredit entire systems, one thing they noted in their last report was that there is no top down guidance from the university on important policy areas. While they didn’t specifically mention safety, the meeting we had today was an attempt to standardize minimum general plans each theatre in the system should have. (Evacuation plan specifying who makes announcement, from where is it made, how often to test emergency lights, etc.)

It was very interesting to learn that the different campuses have vastly different emergency response personnel. The security people on the main campus have portable defibrillators in the golf carts (of course, they are a residential campus too), the guys at my campus are state employees with para-military ranks like police officers. The security folks on the other side of the island and a neighboring island are contracted from an outside security company and rotate through so often, they don’t inspire much confidence.

There was also a huge difference in the process people had to go through to get first aid kits. Some had to buy them outright from their own accounts, others got in trouble if they bought them on their own.

There was debate over whether to have emergency announcements played on a recording or done by a person on stage. The recorded announcement allows you to attend to the actual emergency. However having a person on stage 1-is a visual signal that an announcement is going to be made whereas a recorded announcement might get lost in the chatter of speculations about why the show stopped and 2- is more comforting and assuring than an announcement. (After all a certain suspicion might arise that you have already left the building after pushing play on the CD player if you aren’t on stage.)

One of the biggest lessons that came out of the session was that any emergency plan should specify exactly who is the top person in charge. While key people might supervise large segements of an emergency plan, there should be one overall person who makes final decisions. And everyone in the building should know who that person is.

An attendee at the conference told the story about a promoter who was standing backstage before the show. The police came in and asked who was in charge. He said he was. The police informed him about a possible situation and told him he had to make a decision. Instead of speaking with the event manager for the facility which he was presenting the show in, he went out on stage and made a very alarming announcement to the audience. The house crew having been well trained, immediately acted to open evacuation routes so that the audience did not injure themselves in the abrupt departure.

Had the facilities management been informed at all, they would have been able to better assess if the situation was an actual threat to the audience or if they would have been safer staying in their seats.

A couple interesting stats and facts to present in closing.

1-The chances of someone becoming injured in an emergency evacuation is actually rather high. Be sure you correctly assess a threat to the audience and have a very comforting presentation for them if you are going to ask them to stay put. This is especially true in the case of a power outage. Unless there is an electrical fire that caused it, it is better to keep the audience in place and then evacuate them in a very controlled manner if it becomes clear power will not be restored.

2- The National Fire Safety Protection Association guidelines for evacuations is 1 person per every 250 guests. So if you have a 750 seat theatre, if you need to have at least 3 ushers helping people leave. (Though check with your municipality, some places have adopted other fire codes that may be different.)

Stay At Home Managers

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Great! I was going to try to get away with not doing a post today, but now Drew McManus has gone and linked back to my website as a result of a discussion we have been having about a recent post of his. Now you know, there is all this pressure to come up with something pithy so that the new visitors he is sending my way will stay and read a bit.

Okay how about–“Build a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.”

I can’t take credit for that, it is the warped genius of writer Terry Pratchett.

Drew’s ideas are intriguing though. I don’t know if it is viable in practice, but it is something that bears considering. In these changing times, I think any intelligent proposal begs looking in to. Before people label his suggestion as preposterous and not in touch with the reality of how things are done, I actually saw a hint of something similiar in the last two weeks.

In a recent entry I mentioned getting a call from a woman working for a potential competitor.

What I didn’t mention was that this woman was working from her home office as a consultant working up a business plan for the organization. Now granted, if the organization had a building constructed, she might have been working out of there as a full time employee. The fact that the organizing group had picked a person with a home business rather than one with a snazzy office in town might be a harbinger of things to come…or may be not. Perhaps the overriding motivation was that she was cheaper than the guys in town and the organizing group didn’t have a lot of money to spare.

But that is Drew’s exact point.

So we will see how things play out over the next few years. Given that just yesterday The ArtfulManager suggested that the 501 (c) (3) route may be the wrong business classification “tool” for the goals of organizations, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next 25-30 years brought a transitional period where the way arts entities are organizes morphs and perhaps diversifies.

Lung Cancer for a Good Cause

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There is an article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer that just seems like a no-win situation for the arts in Cuyahoga County Ohio. They are proposing using a tax from cigarettes to fund the arts.

Doesn’t seem like a position you would want to be in. If people stop smoking, there goes your funding. At the same time do you want to be encouraging people to smoke so you can keep your funding?

When try to raise money by having fun runs and selling candy bars, you can be pretty confident about telling people that it is for a good cause. You really don’t want to be telling people to smoke because it is for a good cause. Even worse, you don’t want your chain smoking Aunt Evelyn smirking at your disapproving look when she lights up and saying that you should be happy, because she is single handedly underwriting your season.

Probably the only thing worse would be if Nevada started to fund the arts with taxes paid by legal sex workers. Can you imagine an arts manager coming home to find his/her spouse has been involved on one side or the other of that?

“Well you were working so hard and so many hours at the theatre. I figured if you got a little more funding, you would be able to hire some help and be home more often. I was only doing it out of love for you honey.”

Okay, maybe that is a little extreme. Though an amusing image if you picture it in a cartoon rather than actually affecting real life people.

The good news from the Plain Dealer article though is that using tourism taxes like restaurant and hotel tax proceeds is already being considered.

Grants as Pre-Canaan Classes

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Back in January I praised how easy it was to complete a grant follow up. Lord knows I would love for them all to be that easy.

However, I have seen some value lately in the long, drawn out, detailed grant proposals. I am writing up a grant for the National Endowment for the Arts’ Challenge America fast track grant program. I have created a partnership with another arts organization to create a multi-disciplinary (though heavily dance) piece to premiere in the Fall 2006 based on the Hawaiian Naupaka myth.

The grant isn’t due until June, but there is a great deal of work to do and then a great deal of photocopying to do of that work so I am laboring away at it. (And incidentally, working on the NEA grant reminded me that I have a final grant report due for another proposal in May. In searching for the CD with the form on it, I realized I may have thrown it away and was able to ask to have another CD sent to me.)

It is 18 months until the performance and while we have discussed the show a number of times, there are some aspects of our partnership we haven’t clarified. I say this because in the course of writing the grant, a few questions have arisen that I couldn’t answer. There are also a few paragraphs that I want to run by the other guy to make sure we are of the same mind in some instances (or if he has ideas about rewording to make things sound better!)

I am going to meet with him on Friday to discuss these things. In my mind, the grant is sort of like a pre-Canaan session where engaged couples are asked to think about all sorts of matters such as kids, finances, where to spend holidays, etc–essentially clarifying the details of what their relationship is going to be.

These are all topics we would have gotten around to discussing, but some of them might not have come up–or at least not talked about in specific enough terms–until we were faced with a situation where the other guy assumed the other was taking care of the arrangements and neither does.

The NEA of course wants to make sure you have thought about these things before they hand you the taxpayers’ money. (The per captia amount of which won’t get you a Coke). If you really want to know what these topics are, take a look at the 29 page grant application (half of which are instructions)

There will be plenty of things my partner in this endeavor and I will have to discuss and make mistaken assumptions about that the grant doesn’t cover. In some sense, it is helpful to have the process of this grant there to start the conversation. (In another sense, of course, the process is a pain in the butt. But you probably already knew that.)