The Fools versus the Kitty: What Happened?

St Idiot Collective PRESS RELEASE

Local Arts Non-Profit Forced to Change Fundraising Venue One Day Before Event

Austin, Texas. April 13, 2007: "What happened?" We're not entirely clear when or where the miscommunication began in the chain of command but basically here is what happened from our perspective: We have been in contact with the tenants of GKS (Meagan and Tyler) for over three months in planning this event. They seemed very eager to support our group, offered us a discounted rental price which we paid in full in February and though no official documentation was provided (rental agreement or contract; just an invoice was given) we considered this to be a verbal agreement. We were clear on the limited parking situation upfront and had a plan for parking attendants to direct guests to appropriate parking; we were clear on the amount of guests we could have (we had food and drinks to accommodate 200 people throughout the night but we did not estimate more than 75 people would occupy the space at one time). We knew we would have to turn our sound down at 11pm, etc. We were more than prepared to accommodate each and every concern the management presented.

Thursday night after cleaning the entire {5,000sq feet} warehouse (which was completely disgusting and uninhabitable; each Idiot has a horror story of some disgusting object cleaned or removed from the space) a woman named Penny showed up and introduced herself as the owner of the building. She claimed to not have known anything about our event and of course wanted to know who we were, what we were organizing, etc. Although visibly upset about the miscommunication with her tenants, she made it sound like we could work it out. Penny and SIC agreed that the plan for Friday was for Adriene to contact Meagan, then Meagan and Penny would talk and then we would call Penny at 3pm Friday to make any additional accommodations needed.

Friday rolls around - Meagan is on her way to LA so unreachable by phone for a few hours. We leave several messages. We plan to send a member out to the neighborhood to seek out additional parking spaces at the local businesses; we load two trucks with equipment to do a second night of set up and decorating. Two of our members drop off a set piece around 5pm and notice a maintenance man changing the locks; however, our key code still works so we assume, all is cool -- Penny is there, walking door to door talking to the neighbors but does not say a single word to any of our members. We again assume everything is going ahead as planned; no one has told us otherwise and at 3pm one of our members had actually spoken to Penny on the phone and Penny said nothing about any changes to our event as planned....

At 6:45pm, four of us show up with the truckloads of equipment to find the key code entrance removed, with all our belongings locked inside. Meagan is still unreachable -- as she is in an airplane headed for LA -- and Penny will not return our calls. We wait four hours until the official word comes from Tyler who finally gets a hold of Meagan. We're locked out completely and have nothing we can do but wait.

I should note that no official word has ever been communicated to us by Penny throughout this entire situation. Meagan recently emailed us to say that Penny did indeed know about our event ahead of time (for about a month)...and has maintained her silence throughout. The building is in the process of finishing up the process to obtain building permits with the city and my guess is that she felt our event too risky to host. However, she chose to keep silent, let us clean her entire venue and then lock us out a day before with all of our event equipment plus personal belongings inside.

The lack of professionalism on the part of Gutter Kitty Studios in communicating with us is absolutely inexcusable.

We are grateful that we got to host our event at all this year and extremely thankful to all our supporters who helped it be a success.

We originally heard about the venue space from friends in the film community who had hosted their fundraiser there months ago. I've heard that everything from art openings, birthday parties to film crews have used the space for events, productions, etc.

We were finally able to retrieve our equipment 9:15pm Friday night, Penny was present -- again did not say a single word to any of us in explanation....

Due to the limitations of the new space we did have to downscale our event. We could not accept donations for drinks (all money went to the bar) and we had to abandon our karaoke booth, an office lounge, and our video projection room. Adriene called The Scoot’s booking manager just after we got the final ax from Gutter Kitty… “I didn’t even think he would return my call, but at that point I was calling everyone and anyone that could possibly save the day.” The Scoot Inn are truly the heroes of the day. We were able to share our event with a birthday party outside (coincidentally - they were acquaintances of ours!) and last minute they helped us. As well as bid on the raffle.

We were all so impressed with the new Scoot -- the idiots are all big fans of the monthly Waxploitation events that used to be hosted there but this was the first time any of us had been by since the venue changed hands.

And our event STILL drew a big crowd, we lost a bit of money to the bar but people were extremely generous at the door and we've had some additional donations trickling in from people who heard about the venue mishap or had planned to attend but couldn't.

We also have been in communication with Tyler and Meagan who have promised to return our rental money and compensate us for the combined 40hrs of labor that went into cleaning the warehouse space.

Still no word from Penny.

Personal frustrations aside we really hope that those in the film and arts community know about this situation. Our company began with 12 artists each putting $20 on the table from our wallets to throw our very first Fool's Fund at the Blue Theater. An additional fundraising campaign helped us produce our first show: Vaudeville Vanya with NYC director J. Ed Araiza from the SITI company.

Vanya was a completely volunteer-run production aside from a small stipend awarded to our stage manager-extraordinaire. This year, with the support of a COA grant we are hoping to be able to do a three week run of a new collaborative-built production based on the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus, with plans to pay all of our collaborators a small stipend and improve our design budget and capabilities.

We will be hosting an additional fundraiser to make up for the thousands we lost in June. We will be throwing a Improv Comedy show FUNdraiser June 22nd complete with the TITO's office drink that we missed out on at The Scoot.

SIC’s main stage summer show is scheduled for August.

Sincerely,

The St Idiot Collective