Phil's also earned contest wins at SolarFest and Susquehanna Music and Arts, was showcased at Kerrville and the NorthEast Regional Folk Alliance, had showcase and main stage slots at Falcon Ridge, and has played celebrated venues like Club Passim and Caffe Lena.Last time he was in Bellows Falls — a year and some months after he played here — he was on the Opera House stage with Mark Erelli. Maybe you caught that show. Now a year and some months after that, he's back here again.(One of the many differences between us and the Opera House is that they've got 550 seats... over 500 more than us. If you're into intimate performances where the performers are right up close, boy howdy do we have intimate for ya. And our tickets are cheaper, too.)Erin Ash Sullivan, who was half of the folk duo Edith O. along with Amy Speace in NYC in the ’90s, ain't no slouch either. She was the recipient of the Mark Erelli Judge’s Choice Award in the New England Songwriting Competition; a Songwriter Serenade semifinalist; a finalist in the Rose Garden Performing Songwriter Competition; a finalist in the Mid-Atlantic Song Contest; and John Platt’s selection for the Folk DJ Showcase at NERFA. She's also the three-time winner of her hometown’s Fourth of July pie eating contest.They'll play a 3:00 matinee at Stage 33 Live on September 7, 2025. Tickets are a wicked low $20 in advance through stage33live.com or at the door as available. Advance tickets guarantee entry. Only 40 tickets will be sold. The performances will be recorded and filmed. 

The 2026 schedule is shaping up. It's a work in progress. Some audience faves are coming back, having patiently waited their turn, and new acts worth a look-see. 

The podcast is gonna happen — there will be an audio-only version as well as a video version. The plan is to drop one a month, hopefully starting in September. They'll clock in at under an hour. It'll be available on all the usual platforms.

We'll also be making the whole series available to broadcasters, letting them decide their own schedule (assuming they'll want to air it). The broadcast episodes will be 56 minutes, a couple minutes shorter than the podcasts because the podcasts have sponsorship acknowledgements and stuff.

Little setback on the broadcast thing though. We were happily buzzing along, making good progress using a two-bay dock with a pair of 4TB drives... same system we use to edit everything. But o my droogies one of the drives developed a bad sector of the worst possible sort, and the drive wouldn't read anymore without reallocating and reformatting, which would erase everything. Four full episodes were on that one, and though we do make backups of everything, we tend not to back up the working discs while we're working. Because we ain't that smart. It wouldn't be that hard to set up a real-time backup. Will we though?

As this missive gets typed, a disc recovery program is attempting to reconstitute the files for us. It seems to be working, but the folder hierarchy is completely gone and all the files are renamed. We can probably get it sorted and save ourselves from redoing a bunch of work. The recovery's been running for 22 hours, and it says there's another 11 hours to go. If we have to, we'll rebuild what we lost from scratch. But this setback means that the complete broadcast run most likely won't be ready for a couple months or more, because we'll be prioritizing working up the new stuff once the live shows kick in again next month. 

Speaking of broadcast, anybody out there know about deliverables standards for video? Things seemed to loosen a lot during Covid in terms of less-than-perfect being OK. We don't have $20,000 cameras and screamin' production tools, but we're doing pretty good with what we've got.We found a pre-Covid thing from CPB that said H.264, DNxHD, or similar; 1920 x 1080 at 10 Mbps with 320 kbit/s audio.DNxHD, DNxHR, and ProRes with linear audio are about 8ish GB per episode, while H.265 10 with 320 AAC audio clock in at half that or less with negligible degradation, so we've been going that route. 

But everything's not all joyless teeth-gnashing. Charlie Hunter appealed to the Friends of Studio Cat Corduroy, an ad-hoc subgroup of Charlie's social media dynasty, to raise $300 to cover hosting of our first podcast season in memory of Corduroy ("an enthusiastic, if opinionated, participant" of Stage 33 Live). Those crazed people chipped in a full grand.

Somebody also ran a Facebook birthday fundraiser on our behalf, which we had no idea about until we got an email saying that some money was going into our bank account. And a couple other people, unprompted, made direct donations and sent really nice words.We're putting as much as we can into the secret Performer Guarantee Fund that we don't tell the performers about. We want them to get paid something that at least approaches the lowest scale for the smallest venues in the worst markets as recommended by the Traveling Musicians Union... but when turnout is small, the money falls short. Touring performers with expenses like gas and food and lodging can end up losing money.All the ticket money goes to the performers, we don't take a cut. Like we said up there, we ain't that smart.