The haps

Hello, there, friends. I'm sorry I've been such a negligent blogger - things have been busy, both in and out of the Festival offices.

There are two exciting bits of news from behind the curtain (so to speak) - the first of which is that we put the finishing touches on our Festival Guide and sent it off to the printer. In order for that to be accomplished, all of our programming information - showtimes, venues, ticket prices, show "blurbs", names of performers and directors and designers, producer and sponsor credits, etc. - had to be finalized, edited, and proofread at LEAST seventeen times for all shows, Live Arts and Fringe alike. Things got pretty hectic - many of the staff were staying until all hours of the night to fine-tune every word and date and time and ad placement. But now that's done, and the guide is somewhere (Indiana, I think - of all places!) getting printed, all 91,000 copies of it. It'll make its debut both at a members-only happy hour and at Philadelphia's First Friday night in August.

And after getting all that information under control, we could move on to the next step -- selling tickets! Advance tickets for select LiveArts shows went on sale to the general public on July 20th, and tickets for all other shows will go on sale on the internet on August 1st. Since we're still very much in planning mode here in the office, it's been hard to get a handle on how close the festival actually is - but this is definitely making it all seem more real. Opening night is five weeks from yesterday!

A lot of what I've been doing lately has been helping the staff start to get ready for the festival itself. August is crunch time - there's a TON of planning and setting-up to be done in the next few weeks. Today, I helped format Fringe show descriptions to go on the website (right now, all you can see are the Live Arts shows), and did some work organizing artist travel information. Many of our Live Arts acts are local, but the majority are from out of town, and it's our responsibility to get them here, whether that means booking a train from New York or coordinating flights from Poland and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It's also starting to hit me how bizarre the timing of my stint here is - although I'm here for the bulk of the planning, my last day of work will be 5 days before the Festival opens. Of course, I'm planning on coming in and helping out, but it seems strange that I won't really get to fully participate in this experience that I'll have been gearing up for for ten weeks. Oh, well - I guess it's probably pretty important that I, you know, start my senior year of college. Probably.