[HouTango-L] Cotton Exchange Bar update, plus the business of tango

[A. Lester Buck III]

Derik Rawson <d.rawson at rawsonweb.com> writes...


Thursday morning Oct 22nd..


Latest news is that the Cotton Exchange Bar has distributed 5,000
color flyers to promote tango on Thursday nights.  A scanned
image is at

http://houtango.com/maps/twcottonexchangebartango.jpg

A tiny image of the flyer is also on their events page:

http://www.cottonexchangebar.com/events.html


Last Thursday Leonor was our DJ and she also loaded her music into
the computer so we can play it ourselves, which was very nice of
her to do for us.  We had a great time dancing tango until 2am.

Tonight Greg Harbar says that he probably will be playing "live
tangos" at some point because he will be available about 10pm.
Also Eric Lanoix said that he might be able to come play the
bandondeon as well.  There should be a big crowd because of all
the promotion by the bar.  They spent $500.00 on the color flyers
and distributed them to a huge mailing list, nearly 4,000.

I had a long talk with Ralph, the bar manager about the prospects
for the future and here is the situation.  It probably applies to
all of our venues.  He showed me the computer print out which keeps
track of sales.  Our tango group brought in $70.00 in bar sales
over a 3 hour period last week and the belly dancers brought in
$75.00 over a one hour period.  The bar needs to do about $300.00
to $500.00 to make an evening work, and then the evening will
grow from there into the thousands.  The bar does not care where
the sales come from.  Tango will last at the bar if it attracts
people who buys drinks .  If it does not, then the bar will have to
promote something else, or just sit tight and go with the general
ambiance of the beautiful setting which is what it has been doing.
This is the reality.  If we like the Cotton Exchange Bar as a tango
venue, then we will have to demonstrate that we can make it work.
This also applies to all the other venues including Cafe Matisse,
which is currently unavailable.

In general, I have found that dancing tango usually costs about
$7 to $10 a night per person no matter where one goes (Paris, New
York, Dallas, Austin, etc.), so this means that we need to have
about 30 people to support a bar ourselves, or find an audience
to watch us, as the belly dancers do.  This is why we all need to
work to expand our tango community in Houston.  Collecting money
for our little tango organization is not going to do much for us.
Even it has to give some of that money to its bar to keep it going,
Cafe Matiisse.  If we want places to dance which are convenient
for "our" personal schedule, we have to enlarge our group to make
sure that someone is always around even when we personally cannot
make the scene.  We all have "tango budgets" each month, so it is
difficult for each of us to go to all the venues, but we can make
the venues work if we have larger numbers in our organization.
This is why major cities smaller than Houston, have tango groups
that work.  They have the numbers.  If we do not develop and grow,
we will  constantly have to find new venues, which is what we
are doing now.  We have a lot of venues but our attrition rate
is high.  What we do will determine what happens.  Talk is cheap.
Advice no one needs. Action is everything. We need to decide
which venues we will support and do it.  It is as simple as that.

Come to the GALLERIA, come to PRIVE, come to BELMAR, come to THE
COTTON EXCHANGE BAR, come to CAFE EXPRESS, come to VICTOR'S come
to MARTIN'S, come to ALWAYS TANGO, or find people to go there..
Let us all work to make things grow, so we can dance tango whenever
we want.  See you at the next venue wherever that is...

Derik
<d.rawson at rawsonweb.com>
713-256-9773 Cell