In my 30+ years as a marketer in the A/E/C industry, I have been responsible for a lot of corporate celebrations and other events, from initial planning to post-event analysis. These events have included small "lunch and learn" or "brown bag" meetings, staff Christmas parties, catered client holiday open houses with 500+ invited guests, client golf tournaments, and trade shows with five or six staff members in attendance, a booth and a hospitality suite.
I have a checklist that I developed many years ago, and that I still use when I am hired to plan an event for a client. As I have learned the hard way, checklists ensure that you don't forget a critical element until it's too late to do anything about the lack.
Now, a lot of the people reading this blog, mostly business contacts, don't know about my side career as a cabaret performer.
For the last two months, I have been planning my own personal event. In fact, it's actually a dual event: celebrating my 40th anniversary as a professional cabaret performer, with performances at both Brass House in Austin and Kitchen Cafe in north Dallas.
I have found ways to advertise the event on Facebook, LinkedIn and some other "personals" sites to which I belong. I have also made multiple emails to my friends, family and business contacts in and around both cities.
I have repeated those announcements many times to make sure anyone on any of those sites would see it. On Facebook, I learned that when you post, only a percentage of your friends actually see it, so I also created each performance as an event, a posting that gets to all your friends.
For the Austin gig, I posted a reminder on Facebook today and have another prepared for tomorrow. I will do the same next Friday and Saturday for the Dallas gig.
In one early set of Austin and Dallas announcements, I asked my friends to make requests to help with my programming. I received a half-dozen requests, all songs I know well and enjoy singing.
For the last four days, I've been programming the two evenings. With three sets, each lasting approximately 45-50 minutes, I needed 45-48 songs. So I went to my overall song list and made a really drastic first cut, and got down to 140 songs.
I let that percolate in my head overnight, went back and cut the list to 82 songs. Then I sat down at the piano to figure out which ones I really remembered, which would need a little work, and which would need a lot of work. Those in the latter category got cut right away, and the list was down to just over 50.
Yesterday, I sat down and figured out how to structure the show. Each of the three sets needs an appropriate opening and closing song, and a mix of material (fast, slow, story-telling, romantic, angry, comic, etc.) that won't bore the audience or exhaust them emotionally. With that done, I'm just working on polishing lyrics.
Having done all this preparation, I am ready to go onstage for both of these events. And after all the hours I've spent on various stages over the last 40 years, I am very much at home there. All I have to do is stay calm and be myself. As my good friend Stephen Mosher said in 2003 in "The Sweater Book,"
"If one is at home in one's own skin, one can be at home anywhere."
Such an important lesson!
I really hope to see all my Austin area and DFW Metroplex friends at either of these events.