Hard stuff going on with Bellows Falls cultural fixtures lately. Stone Church Arts, which hosted so many excellent shows for years, is over. And now our village's funky coffee house, Flat Iron Exchange, is finished too. (Flat Iron Exchange has donated us a good whack of paper goods — like napkins and cups — for when we can get going again. They also got us started with a ceramic mug collection. We're super grateful, but our strong preference would have been conditions being such that they could have stayed open. We'll use the items in grateful memory.)Stage 33 Live — which was still working on becoming a cultural fixture when the pandemic descended — abides in performance-hosting limbo, though is nonstop active behind the scenes both catching up and future-prepping. 

You might be reading this later, but today is Sunday, October 11, and this evening's Fred Gillen Jr. show with Carl Beverly opening has been nixed by COVID-19, like everything since March has been... including:

Looking forward, definite cancellations include:

This toppling is expected to continue well into 2021, including:

Maybe it's late to the game, or maybe the timing is perfect... but we're still eyeing the possibility of gearing up to be able to live-stream solo acts from our stage, sans audience (contingent on the 33 Bridge Street tenants and owners giving it a green light) until the pandemic is handled. But our whole thing is to try to help elevate performers — if it's not going to have better sound and optics than somebody streaming with their phone from their living room, we ain't gonna do it. We're confident though, and already have most of the necessaries in hand. There's some question about whether the outbound connectivity is up to it, we'll need to run tests. 

And we got a bit of grant money this difficult year toward camera upgrades, yay! Ben & Jerry's has pledged $500 of support; it hasn't arrived yet, but we're pretty sure their word is good. Claremont Savings Bank issued $1,000 which is so appreciated! There are two proposals still waiting on foundation determination. Our under-the-radar champion supporter continues to be The Island Corporation, which owns and operates the 33 Bridge Street creative economy incubator where we're located. Our very existence is — in inordinate measure — thanks to them.So, about the camera upgrades. The pie-in-the-sky, go-big-or-go-home, best-case for new cinecamera bodies and lenses and loupes and cards is a whole lotta dough. Like a real lot. (To us, that is... it's nowhere even near the awards given every year to many of Vermont's already-well-funded organizations and initiatives.) We've known from the beginning that broadcast quality cameras would be the final, and by far the biggest, mission-critical planned equipment upgrade that we'd need to hurdle. The dream list realistically probably won't be achieved at this stage of our evolution, but whatever kind support comes will be invested in the best way possible to fulfill the intent. We may not be able to get hands on the ideal setup, but incremental improvements has been our M.O. and it's been a better-than-expected trajectory. 

We continue chipping away at the documentation backlog. The original plan was to do a show, do the post work, and then post the post in time to start over again for the next show. Longtime lurkers may remember that there was a totally unexpected amount of enthusiasm by out-of-our-league performers interested in hitting the room, and we ended up digging a hole that we're still crawling out of. We're getting there, and may actually be positioned to follow the intended protocol by the time we can start running shows again.  Related, there's a page on the website now with easy access to all the clips we've posted so far: stage33live.com/binge/ ... a lot of the older stuff is going to get revised at some point after we catch up with ourselves — we have better capabilities for processing both audio and video than we used to, and the difference is striking.Also related, we noticed a view-bump for one of Hiroya Tsukamoto's beautiful performances, and tracked it down to a glowing review in Acoustic Guitar Magazine back in September of his newest album. They embedded the clip as a footnote to the review on their website, which is way cool.Ever upward in a weird world.Hope you're well and as happy as possible.