Stage 33 Live is way farther along than we originally thought it would be at this point — and we only got here because we had lots of help and support. Usually a little at a time, sometimes more. All of it so very meaningful. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you.The point of the thing, as you'll recall, is to provide opportunities for local and regional performers and presenters to have an attentive, intimate audience... and to record and film them in the act for radio, TV, and web. We also open the door to bigger fish if they'd like to come, because their participation helps shine light on our homies. We've somehow had more of these bigger fish than we ever imagined we would.It's a ton of volunteer time and effort. Seriously, a lot. But it's worth it.There were a few bumps in the road during our first year, something to be expected. With your encouragement, we persisted.We kept cycling through old PA speakers on their last legs... but now we're actually in a position to be able to choose between two sets based on which are most appropriate for a given performance.Our gorgeous vintage mixer literally went up in smoke an hour before a show... but we're now outfitted with a brand-new one that also provides redundant audio capture.Stuff like that.We've broken through a few bottlenecks too.We actually have stage monitors now. We prefer not to use them if we don't need to (the recordings come out better if we don't, less leakage), but we have them.The audio has been pretty good from right out of the gate, but the video — at first — was atrocious. We were using two $50 white-label videocameras, because that's what we could afford to just get the thing moving. Over the course of the first year, we were able to beef that up with a pretty nice HD camcorder, and two awesome little 4K beauties. A world of difference! Spendy though. A couple more would be great. Someday we'll have somebody shooting handheld too.Perhaps the biggest breakthrough so far happened just yesterday: The new editing computer arrived. This is a significant turning point. We don't actually have a computer monitor that will work with it yet (DisplayPort only; but we can get a VGA adapter), so we haven't fired it up. The old computer — a bargain-basement rebuilt HP office machine with one of the worst-rated processors on the market — couldn't even handle proxy files... it would crash, lock up, lose work, render all night just to crap out at 95%. We're so incredibly far behind on fulfilling the documentation! That changes starting now. Or as soon as we get a monitor going on it anyway. (That computer we have, by the way, has enough oomph to work just fine for recording multitrack audio... so it's still got purpose and a loving home. We've all of us got our strengths and weaknesses, but there's always a way to contribute.)We still don't have actual stage lights, just white hardware-store floods. But we were recently donated a DMX controller for LED stage fixtures! It's a proper start.There have been dozens of improvements, upgrades, additions — many small, some major, all of them with purpose and virtue.There are certainly classier, bigger venues and performance centers nearby and nearish-by with way, way, WAY more funding, and they're doing their thing well. We ain't them, they ain't us, it's all good. We're always eager to repurpose, repair, and reuse, and are proud that our get-up kinda looks like it might have been assembled by hopeful post-apocalyptic scavengers. Nice ones. Not cannibals or anything.Oh... we lost sight of the point we were making: Friends, there's been so much progress that our mission-critical list of needfuls is pretty much done. That. Is. Freakin'. Amazing. We still have a wishlist though, probably always will. So if you ever get a hankering to do a little sumpin-sumpin, you can. It's on our website — www.stage33live.com — under the "Support" link. It's so fine-grained that it even includes things like masking tape. We'll keep it maintained, we'll add to it and take things away as the sands shift. And money donations will always be plowed into operations in whatever way they need to be at any given time. (We're already thinking about how to pay next year's insurance without running a freaked-out emergency fundraiser. Again. Ugh.)Anyway — we're so grateful for everything that's happened, and everything that's going to happen. So grateful.We'll try to never ever again send two of these out in two days. But we just really needed to thank you.(The next one will probably come early next week, and it'll be about the excellent big library fundraising show on the 31st. That doesn't count as promo, just info.)