Happy Friday the 13th!!   The Strand is busy.   There are several things to talk about, but one that is very important first.

When we started this project we have been always been guided by two things.  1)  Audience Safety 2) Audience Comfort.   Bob S. takes care of the audience comfort issues and safety is something that is always ongoing.   The Strand had an audience member identify a safety problem we didn’t even know we had.
The very first row in the balcony had the seats removed.  Those seats had their sight lines blocked by the rail.   Because of this it is hard to tell the last row floor.  We thought we had solved this by painting that bottom row maroon.  We found out last night that this didn’t completely work.  We visited our friend Ray Wetnight and he came up with a solution.  We are installing reflective edge floor tape on the edge of the entire step.  That is 50′ wide.   This should solve this once and for all.  This will be installed on Monday when it arrives.  Thank you to the patron who brought this to our attention!

This past week was fun.  The Veteran’s Tribute on Wednesday night was very special.  Bustin’ Loose this past weekend put on a great show.  The New Life United Methodist Church Choir sang beautifully in their patriotic tribute.

The week is fun to!   We have an Art Auction by PS Fine Arts tonight.  This is high-end artwork.  Check our web site for details. Saturday is the Snowflake Princess Contest at 1:00pm.   Saturday night is the night all you country music fans have been waiting for.   The Eastern Wing Band will perform on the Strand stage starting at 8:00pm.    We look forward to seeing you at the theatre!

We always strive to keep everyone “in-the-loop.”   This sometimes (or most times) takes quite a bit of space in these emails.  It is important to us that we have no secrets and we tell all.  This is everyone’s project and there are several things that just might be of interest to some, so we tell it all.  With that said (warning, tech talk ahead) we had a nice upgrade in our sound system this past week.
We struggle with movie sound.  The mono movies and the surround sound movies all need to sound good.   We have struggled to get this right.  Ron B. finally had enough.  He set out to fix the problem.  The biggest issue is we have no funds to do this, not to worry, Ron is a crafty guy.  In his travels last week, he stopped at every pawn shop he could to find equipment.  After looking and looking, he started to find what we needed.  In the end he bought 3 pieces of equipment from 3 different shops.  The total value of the equipment is about $1400.  We ended up paying $152, we could afford that!   The system now has a dedicated 8 channel stereo mixer in the booth.  Along with the mixer we have a digital sound processor.  This decodes the modern movies and allows us to isolate sound tracks.  The last gizmo is just that, you will have to ask Ron yourself exactly what it does.  All this pumps the signal down to our main board.   This was installed and configured this past Friday night.  He started a  11:00pm and finished at 2am.   The difference is remarkable.  While it still isn’t a new and modern system, it is very respectable for our theatre.  Thank you Ron.

Thanks for the support.