On Sunday February 24, 2008 the Shelby Community Band will play its first concert at the Strand. As many of you know, both Steve F. and I play in the band. It is something we have been looking forward to for a long long time. This will be a great opportunity to hear a wonderful concert. We will play interesting music with some guest vocalists. This event is free. I hope to see many of you on Sunday. Please pass the word along. Again the Strand is happy to provide the facility for this performance.

General work is still progressing. Steve F. and Rhonda S. have been cleaning the south basement. This is a bit more important that it would appear on the surface. We have a lack of storage space. The north and south basements are vital to our operations storing many of the items necessary to run a theatre. The basement looks great. It will soon be home to new lights, safer electricity and storage shelves. Did you know we had an extra 5 toilets? Yep, they were all in a pile in the basement. They didn’t look very good. Thanks to Steve and Rhonda for getting that done.

Bob S. is feeling better. He and Gordon have been quite the doers. There are all sorts of small projects that have been finished. Gordon is still painting away. Some day we will be finished, until then, Gordon is ready for the task. Ron Bush finished tuning our sound system. The under stage speakers are installed and working perfectly . Ron has that place sounding great! Bob and I finished installing the grilles around the stage for those speakers. Unless you go looking, know one will ever know they are there.

Our web site will soon be taking shape. A new Strand volunteer, Shane Killgore, will be leading the charge. Shane is from California and will guiding the web development work for the Strand. When done, I know it will knock your socks off. He is very talented and we appreciate him working on our project.

Steve D. and Darin M. are working feverishly to get the theatre a little more usable. I do mean feverishly, Darin didn’t look so well the first part of the week. We are patching together a lighting system to give us basic stage lighting. It will also control our house lights too. This is all possible because of a very nice donations/sale of old lighting control equipment from Shelbyville Central Schools. The largest part in any lighting project is the control, and that is something we don’t have to worry about. Steve is working hard to find those spare amps (capacity) here and there to power the system. For you who know about electricity, I will give you a few fun facts that we are dealing with. We have our old 100A single phase electrical system that ran the entire theatre for years. To that we now have a new 400A panel too. We still have not tied the two together to eliminate the 100A drop. The only problem is the ! $1200 p iece of wire that it will take to connect the two. The lighting system is wired for 4 wire three phase. We have 2 3 phase drops to the theatre. A 100A drop at the projection booth, and another under the stage. The 3 phase is used only for our HVAC system. We have plenty of capacity…..only problem is that Steve discovered it is a 3 wire system, not a 4 wire system needed for the light boards. Steve and Ron Bush discussed the problem and felt that they would be able to convert the dimmer racks to single phase. We called the manufacture and Steve spoke to the chief engineer. After doing some investigation, the engineer informed Steve that he was absolutely correct in this assumptions (I had no doubt), and that yes, they could easily be converted. We then energized the equipment and it worked fine. While we were playing with that, Darin did a full load amp test on our old 100A service. At capacity it is only pulling just over 9 amps. Yippee! We found the capacity to temporarily ! connect the lighting system in the projection booth. Hopefully we will be able to install our permanent solution (that expensive piece of wire) soon, but until then we can say…..let there be light! You will see our rudimentary system in action this weekend. It is a very safe and effective solution. We will hopefully have a more permanent and usable solution this summer. Thank you to Steve, Darin and Ron for being so darn clever in solving this stuff. Even that chief engineer was impressed by Steve’s ability rethink their equipment’s capability. It is interesting to note at on all the newer systems, they do exactly what Steve figured out……they can be switchable from 4 wire 3 phase to single phase.

Sorry of the tech stuff, but I think it is interesting. Just another way were are trying to fix up our old theatre.

Congrats to long time Strand supporter and Arts Advocate Loretta Eckstein on her well deserved recognition from the Shelby County Chamber of Commerce. Had is not been for Loretta and the people that have laid the foundation for our work, the Strand today would not exist. Next time you see her, give her a big KISS for us.

See you this weekend.
David