Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Many thanks to the kind persons

who made the Bad Poets Society a stark reality on Sunday.
Stephannie Workman
Amanda Rotondo
Diane Statkus
Zoe Swenson
Gene Doucette (poetry captain)
Colin Buckley
Jimmy Tingle (our friendly neighborhood bartender and celebrity reader)
and
Joseph Zamparelli Jr our long suffering director.
As hard as it is to mine the poetry and get it down to a tight 39-42 item it is really you guys that bring this strange and mannered event to vibrant life.
Jon Haber and I are much in your collective debt.
Sunday night's program might not have been a big financial success, but it was a blockbuster in creative esthetic terms.
Quite frankly my ibggest worry going into "BPS '06" was that it was an irony-heavy event very much a creature of it's time which was the mid-1990's.
Like a good episode of "Friends" it was funny (or so we hoped) but would it still work in these fractious times?
The answer to that is a resounding yes...energy like that doesn't permeate a room on the echo of shows done back in 1998.
So we are definitely going to do it again, hopefully in April (National Poetry Month, doncha' know...wait'll they get a load of US!)
Meanwhile we do have some marketing and publicity issues to resolve with respect to BPS, all suggestions are welcome.
Take care, the best has yet to come.

6 comments:

Gene said...

Thanks, John. As far as marketing questions go, I don't know what was done for this last show, but I can tell you that my two kids, who are both in high school, loved the show, as did one of my daughter's friends who is a HS senior. I would think (and again, maybe you already do this) marketing would have to be targeted at college and high school students. Preferably college, naturally...

Zolok said...

Yeah its a venue with a liquor license, so the marketing by nature commences with an over 21 college age cohort.
We did drop a number of flyers at Tufts, MIT and to a lesser extent Harvard, BU and the Berklee School of Music.
But you make some suggestive points.

Gene said...

Interesting that they let under 21's in to see it then...

Zolok said...

Now that you mention it, the trigger point is the bar not the venue itself.
So I suppose under 21's are allowed in...
Hmmmmm.

Gene said...

If it's not an issue, I'm sure my kids (+ the kid my daughter invited) would be happy to distribute flyers around Cambridge Rindge and Latin... Although I do think college kids would be preferable.

CMB said...

While chilling out at ArtBeast this past weekend, I was wondering if this wouldn't be an appropriate venue for another Bad Poets society? It's Davis Square, I'm pretty sure it is free for performers to take part, and there are huge crowds. Just a thought...