Just because the summer season has ended doesn’t mean everyone gets a break! There are lots of things to be done - closing out summer files and getting ready for October! Land of Spirit was fortunate to receive financial assistance from several grants and now it’s time to wrap up final reports and write more grants for next year.
And, the theater has to be “closed up” for a few weeks - tyring to keep dust out of lighting & sound equipment and returning borrowed items. Logan came over this week and took care of the technical equipment. How fortunate we are to have such responsible young people in the community.  They (Logan & his team of lighting and sound technicians) are still high school students but accept responsibility as if they have been working in the world of theater for years.  How pleased their parents must be to have such wonderful children. I know how proud we are to have them working as volunteers for Land of Spirit!
And, would you believe that after the show closed for the season on Saturday night, we had people calling on Monday morning (from Florida) wanting tickets for October! How exciting. However, we hope to do a little adjusting on theater seats - making them more comfortable and easily accessible before the fall season begins. So, this will necessitate a little re-arranging and, hopefully, the numbering of seats so seat assignments can be made when tickets are purchased. Or, at least that is our goal. Don’t know if we will make it by October, but we’ll sure try.
The same goes for our web page. The City of Lavonia is having a new web site designed and have included us in their project. So, mabe by fall we will have a new Land of Spirit site up and running with more information, ticket sales available online, and a picture gallery! Let’s keep our fingers crossed that we meet the developmental deadlines!
We’ve, also, taken time to tally audience surveys for this first season’s performances.  How pleased we were! The biggest complaint (which wasn’t too large in numbers) was about seats being too close together - thus, we’ll be addressing this when we re-arrange the chairs before fall. However, the chairs are designed to hook together for safety reasons and it is difficult to change some of them - but, we’ll give it our best shot!   We will, also, be addressing a sound issue. Several patrons indicated it was difficult hearing, and being somewhat deaf myself, I understand this comment. We will continue to work with Stan on adding different speakers or mics - or, whatever it takes to make the entire theater accessibe to those who are hard of hearing. And, after this first season I feel our actors will be better at projection, - and, that too, will help those of us who cannot hear!
But, for a first performance we could not have been more pleased with audience comments. People are still talking about how wondeful it is for our community and how excited they will be to see it again in October. But, you know - we still have to inteview more peole and gather more stories for a NEW play in 2009! I think that with the success of The Last Hard Times it’s going to make interviewing a lot easier and a lot harder. Easy because more people want to tell their stories, and harder because I don’t know if we have enough volunteers to interview all those on the list! Isn’t that an exciting problem to have - and, success smells so sweet - I can’t wait to get started using that recorder again!
 See you at the theater (in October), Judy
