Padded chairs in the house! Those of you who flipped a few bucks into the Comfy Chair Fund jar at a show, or made a donation for comfy chairs on the website, your help is so appreciated… and it’s because of you that we were able to take advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime, pennies-on-the-dollar, more-donation-than-purchase opportunity to get hands on the chairs from Boccelli’s On The Canal, the beloved and fondly remembered restaurant and listening room that’s now several years in the rear-view mirror.
These chairs come already steeped in our kinda juices, having kept butts comfy during shows by the likes of Dave Alvin and The Guilty Men, Stan Ridgway, Rebecca Loebe, Tom Russell, The Sweetback Sisters, Peter Mulvey, Eilen Jewell, Gurf Morlix, Richard Shindell, Brooks Williams, Antje Duvekot, Alejandro Escovedo, Cliff Eberhardt, Rosie Flores, Red Molly (founding member Carolann Solebello has since played our room), and many more.
When we at long last fling open the doors post-pandemic (go get the dang vaccine if you haven’t yet), these chairs will be waiting for you.
The unlikely, weird, and lovely miracle of Stage 33 Live continues.
Getting pads for the chairs was suggested by more than one of you, and it’s a darned good idea. Some of you have been bringing your own pads, and that’s also a darned good idea.
We did some research and discovered that padded whole chairs can be had for not much more than good chair cushions cost – cheaper, in fact, than fancy nonslip plushies. So we’re chasing actual padded chairs that will be owned and used only by Stage 33 Live. (The Island Corporation lets us borrow their standard metal folding chairs, which is yet another kind thing they do to support us.)
So far, twelve padded chairs have been sponsored and are in hand. We’ll stop at 40. We plan to acknowledge the sponsor on each chair somehow, and we plan to use the chairs forever. You can be immortal(ish)! If other funding happens to come along in bits and bobs, we’ll roll it in… so it’s possible that not all the chairs will have sponsors emblazoned.
(Oh, we should note that sponsoring a chair doesn’t mean that nobody else can sit on it. Seats will still be first-come-first-served. Some shows will still have reserved premium seats up front. And we’ll always put the padded chairs up front. When we eventually have 40 padded chairs, then all the chairs will be padded chairs.)