Archive for the '12 Days of The Ball 2008' Category
Have a Ball!
(This is the Final Day of our “12 Days of the Ball 2008” series)
We’re excited for tonight and hope you are, too! We hope you have a Ball and get everything you wish for this holiday season.
P.S. In NYC, we have the best advance sales in our 14 year history - thanks! If you are buying tickets at the door, we have many cashiers working tonight to keep you out of the rain. See you tonight!
1000+ Expected in LA l Support the LA Jewish Home for the Aging
(This is the 2nd Day of our “12 Days of the Ball 2008” series)
Based on advance sales, we are expecting over 1,000 people to join us for The Ball in LA at the Highlands Hollywood. This is the first time we’ve sponsored The Ball in LA and we’re looking forward to a great event and the start of an annual tradition.
We are proud to be teaming up with The Guardians of the Los Angeles Jewish Home for this event with half of the net proceeds going to support The LA Jewish Home for the Aging. The Young Divisions of The Guardians sponsor upscale fundraising events for young Jewish professional at locations like Harry Houdini’s Estate and The Playboy Mansion.
Over 600,000 Jews live in Los Angeles. But there is only one Home that offers kosher food, a warm Jewish environment and Jewish holiday celebrations for our elderly, no matter what their financial situation. Each year, nearly 1,000 frail seniors are fortunate enough to have a wonderful place to call “Home”.
We hope that, even beyond The Ball, you will continue to support these fine organizations.
Jeeves for Jewsus
(This is the 3rd Day of our “12 Days of the Ball 2008” series)
Since 2001, we’ve offered complimentary limousine service between the multiple venues that comprise The Ball in NYC. We are frequently asked if this service really works and how we can chauffeur more than 4,000 people efficiently.
Truth be told, the first year we tried this, I had no idea if it was going to work as well as I hoped. But it has worked (nearly) flawlessly and people usually do not have to wait more than five minutes for a limo to their destination.
Sit back and relax. Our shofars don't blow.
The main reason that the service works is that we don’t have to transport 4,000 people. Rather, we just have to transport the number of people who want to party-hop at any given point on the space/time continuum. And, except for the very peak of the event (maybe 12 am - 1 am), that usually isn’t that many people. And since we have 8 limos running at any one time, each seating 20-24 people, we can normally handle the demand.
The other key is that we have the limos only travel prescribed routes i.e. Marquee to Hiro or The Park to Marquee. We assign more limos to longer routes and less limos to shorter routes. It’s really quite devious.
Of course, you may have noticed that I wrote above that our limo service has worked “nearly” flawlessly. Can’t slip anything by you. “Nearly” refers to what transpired at The Ball 2006. Two of the venues that night - Duvet & Slate - were located on W 21st St. Duvet’s security personnel, citing their good relationship with the local police, asked me if I wanted them to ask the police to close off traffic on W 21st except for our limos. A jolly good idea, I thought.
But, alas, an idea that bloody well backfired: the police, instead, closed off W 21st Street to our limos, asserting safety concerns because of the large number of people out on the street entering and exiting the limos. This, as Fred Rogers was fond of saying, made “zero friggin’ sense.” Because on W 21st St we had (as we always do) “dispatchers” to ensure that people entered and exited the limos in an orderly fashion and to make sure the limos were never overcrowded. When the police closed W 21st St to the limos, the limos were forced to detour to much busier Sixth Avenue where people were running out into traffic, sans dispatchers, to catch a ride. The situation, which had previously been very safe, was now perilously unsafe.
I spent almost off of The Ball 2006 on W 21st st trying to prevent people from running into traffic on Sixth Ave, trying to reroute our limos, and pleading for common sense from the police. Batted .666 that day.
Incidentally, speaking of “re-routing”: if you are planning to attend The Ball in NYC this Wednesday, you should know that, during the course of the night, we may occasionally stop sending limos to a particular club if that club is already at capacity. When that situation arises, we will change the route of the limos to help distribute the party more evenly. Of course, The Ball is an 8-hour party (8 pm - 4 am) so you’ll have plenty of time to visit all the venues and to leave with more stories from the road than Jack Kerouac.
Attractive Girls Union Refuses To Enter Into Talks With Mike Greenman
(This is the 4th Day of our “12 Days of the Ball 2008” series)
Many great relationships - and marriages - began with friendly banter at The Ball. It’s for this reason, that we suggest Mike Greenman purchase a Jewniversal Pass.
Courtesy of The Onion:
The Song That Semi-Outed Harrison Ford
(This is the 5th Day of our “12 Days of the Ball 2008” series).
In the spirit of the Second Day of Hanukkah, to get you primed for The Ball and, more meaningfully, in the interest of getting a post done quickly, here is the song that sparked a Hanukkah revolution and semi-outed Harrison Ford:
The Curious Case of Schmebster Schmall
(This is 6th Day of our “12 Days of the Ball 2008” series. Problematically, if you are a student of mathematics, The Ball is now 2 days away)
Our decision in 2001 to move The Ball in NYC from one mega-club to multiple smaller venues (”small,” being relative - The Park, for instance, holds 1200 people) was one inspired more by necessity than divine inspiration. And it was occasioned, largely, by the experiences we had in working with the mega-club where we held The Ball in 1996 and in 1998-2000.
We brought that nightclub 3,000 or so people each year. We took all the risk, paid for all the advertising, promotions, music and event staff and, other than running the nightclub on the night of the event, did all the work, which was considerable. My understanding is that the nightclub would generate approximately $65,000 in bar sales from one of our events there and I had heard that our event was their 2nd biggest night of the year (after New Year’s Eve). “Not too shabby” for a day on which the club would otherwise likely be closed.
And yet, of the ten most outrageous things I’ve experienced when working with nightclubs, this nightclub has a stranglehold on the top three.
The nightclub has just recently been remodeled and, as I understand it, some of the management has changed, as well. In the spirit of a fresh start then, I won’t name the nightclub by name. Instead, I’ll just call them Schmebster Schmall.
For the 1996 Ball at Schmebster Schmall, we centered our promotion around the venue’s nightly trapeze show. We promised our guests that the show would occur at the stroke of midnight over the dance floor and we even created an invitation that unfolded into a poster-sized enticement for the trapeze show and The Ball. For their part, Schmebster Schmall contractually agreed to provide the performance and I confirmed and re-confirmed that the trapeze artist would appear.
But as midnight approached there wasn’t even a Flying Wallenda in sight. “He’s coming,” I was reassured at 10 pm. “He’s on his way,” I was told at 11. “He missed his flight,” I was told at midnight. “They never hired him to save $1000,” I was told by a source thereafter.
I can’t stand promising our members one thing and delivering another. So I vowed never to return to Schmebster Schmall. But after The Great Coach Check Disaster of 1997, and with no other large and commercially viable NYC venues from which to choose, we had no choice but to return, grudgingly, in 1998.
The weather for The Ball that year was horrible. But people still came out in droves, for which I’m always grateful. At around 11 pm, I was informed by Schmebster’s event director, Schmartin, that we already had 3,000 people in the building. News that would seem to be good.
But Schmartin pulled me into a quiet space in a stairwell and shared this: “Our contract was only good for the first 3,000 people. Now we need to make a new contract for the 3001st person and beyond.” He said that with a straight face. And, to his credit, that couldn’t have been easy.
In our contract, we had estimated (for staffing purposes) that 3,000 people would attend the event. There was nothing whatsoever to indicate that if more attended the contract would no longer be valid and claiming the same was an affront to common sense. But there were people waiting outside in the freezing rain to get in (the first guy in line had flown in from Israel) and we were at a stalemate: the club wouldn’t allow anyone else in unless I paid them $10 per person.
I expressed my displeasure in no uncertain way, as I’m wont to do in those situations, but had no choice but to accept the new terms because refusing to do so would have left people out in the freezing rain all night. But I again vowed never to return. (I found out later that there weren’t even 3,000 people in the building at that time).
But I did return again because there simply seemed to be no other choice: But for the trapeze incident, people liked our events at that venue. And there were no other venues in Manhattan that were commercially viable and large enough to host our event.
In 2000, shortly before The Ball and after all the promotions were well underway, I received a phone call from Schmebster informing me that they had now decided that without another $5,000 they wouldn’t be able to staff the event adequately. With only a short time before the party, I had no choice but to pay once again. But I knew that this was the final straw and that I would rather lose the event altogether than ever work with them again. And I thought to myself that I hoped that obtaining that $5,000 proved worth it for Schmebster, because they had just sacrificed all the ensuing years of $65,000 nights.
Not counting my deicsion to buy lifetime service for my original TiVo, deciding to move The Ball in NYC from one venue to many beginning in 2001 was probably the best decision I’ve ever made. Since that time, more than 25,000 guests have enjoyed The Ball in four or five-part harmony and the complimentary limousine service we provide between parties.
We love the venues we are working with this in NYC year: Hiro, Marquee, The Park, The Cabanas and Earth. If you are in NYC, we hope you”ll pick up a Jewniversal Pass. It’s your Wonka-inspired Golden Ticket to Christmas Eve merriment.
Best Version of “Dreidel” Not Sung by a Gay Men’s Chorus Ensemble in Full Cowpoke Regalia
(This is the 7th Day of our “12 Days of the Ball 2008” series)
Songs In The Key of Hanukkah - Dreidel
Yippee Chai-Yay
(This is 8th Day of our “12 Days of the Ball 2008” series)
When we first started The Ball, I received a lot of phone calls both from people were unhappy that we were throwing a Jewish-themed event on Christmas Eve. I remember one in particular from an outraged reporter from a Jewish newspaper that I fielded while I was in a bowling alley. The fact that I was in a bowling alley has absolutely no relevance to this paragraph.
The kind of thinking that underlies those phone calls is, at best, antiquated and, at worst, something I may blog about at some point in the future. Suffice it to say that if we are in some kind of war with Christianity, I wish someone would have told me and my non-Jewish friends.
One of the questions I was always asked on those phone calls is why we didn’t sponsor The Ball on Hanukkah instead of Christmas Eve? The answer is easy: because on Christmas Eve virtually all clubs are otherwise empty and because people have no work the next day.
Still, it’s nice when it happens that Hanukkah falls at the same time as The Ball, as it does this year. And its in that spirit that I give you this video. Though some may accuse me of hyperbole, I’m standing firm in my position that this is the best version of “Dreidel” ever sung by a gay men’s chorus ensemble in full cowpoke regalia:
Captain Smartypants Sings Dreidel
The Great Coat Check Disaster of 1997
(This is the 9th Day of our “12 Days of the Ball 2008” series. Unfortunately, The Ball is now 4 days away making me many entries behind. Thanks for not getting on my ass about it. That’s one of the great advantages of having only three readers.)
Coat checks make me want to hang myself.
Yes, the innocuous coat check. You pays your money and you get your ticket. Seems simple enough. Who would have thought that during the early years of our events, they would be our kryptonite?
Coat checks, like bars, are staffed by the clubs themselves. We don’t staff them, the employees who work them aren’t ours, and we don’t make any money from them. Like baseball umpires, if they do their job well, no one notices them.
But when they don’t it’s a car crash with horrified people and twisted metal everywhere.
Our job, as I see it, is to try to prevent the disaster before it happens, by convincing the clubs before a big event to fully staff the coat checks and to keep the prices reasonable (we make this part of our contract with the club). But it isn’t always easy because most clubs see coat checks as a minor detail not worth thinking about very deeply. They don’t see what I see. For I am shell-shocked and I have flashbacks. I see the Ghosts of Coat Checks Past.
I see the times that I had to invade the sanctity of the coat check room myself, vigilante-style, and tell the startled workers that they may not know me but that I was there to help (and not to take their tips). I see the time when I did that at one club only to find that the coat check was a dank unlit and unfinished basement cave and that the employees had failed to hang the coats in any semblance of numerical order. Spent two hours with a flashlight, spelunking for outerwear.
Like this, only with shorter hair and a loincloth.
I see the time that I found that a restaurant/club had taken peoples’ coats (on New Year’s Eve) and, unbeknownst to them, had thrown them randomly across the kitchen table and floor. Happy New Year. I see the time when there were many people waiting for their coats at a particular coat check, but no organized coat check line, so I spent hours, arms outstretched, a human stanchion sans the red velvet.
But mostly I see The Great Coat Check Disaster of 1997.
That year, for reasons I’ll likely explain in a future post, I had little choice but to move The Ball to the Tunnel, a huge but somewhat notorious nightclub.
Tunnel’s events director was my old nemesis, Monica (see The First Ball: A Tale of Terror) and Monica, unfortunately (and in my opinion), never showed any particular concern for whether or not an event ran smoothly. I emphasized and re-emphasized that 3,000 - 4,000 people would likely attend this event and how important it was to the success of the event that the coat check was efficient. And I’m pretty certain that I put in our contract that the coat check had to be fully staffed.
But I couldn’t escape the sinking feeling you have when you sense someone is only “yessing” you to death. I was the Jewish Nostradamus foretelling coat check Armageddon.
I tossed and turned the night before the event, picturing masses of people swarming the coat check, ready to string me up with a scarf. Unable to sleep I finally got up at 4 am-ish, got dressed, and took a taxi to the Tunnel (which was then open on weekends until something like 10 am the next day) to see their coat check in operation thinking it might relax me. I did. It didn’t.
The first six hours of The Ball 2007 were, by any measure, a success. We had our biggest turnout ever. The Coney Island Circus Sideshow performed two shows and we produced two additional stand-up comedy shows in the Tunnel’s VIP Rooms, as well. Everything came together beautifully. Even Donny Vomit nailed it.
It’s really too bad that people were so insistent on retrieving their coats before they left.
Because the Tunnel had only hired 3 coat check people for nearly 4,000 guests. And they hadn’t provided any organized system at all for people to pick up their coats. I had proved that my spider sense was uncanny. Also, I was screwed.
There was no way to handle the mass of humanity that swarmed the coat check booth. I tried the arms outstretched routine with the help of some our employees but we were soon swallowed whole. We tried to get into the coat check booth so that we could assist but they wouldn’t let us in. Management, to the extent they could even be located, claimed there was nothing they could do. This was coat check hell.
They say there is a solution to every problem. But this was my Kobayashi Maru - a no-win scenario (warning: geek reference).
And so, like a rat in a maze from which there is no escape, I eventually gave up. I thought of the expression: “This too shall pass,” which, as it turns out (who knew?), originated from a Jewish folktale. I wrote the apology I would send to our members the next day in my head.
I never worked with Monica again. The owner of the clubs where she worked eventually got in a fair bit of trouble. A few years later I saw her outside of Madison Square Garden when she was leaving a performance of the circus. She bounded across the street to greet me like an old friend. It was fairly inexplicable.
We almost never have coat check problems these days because I refuse to work with clubs anymore that don’t show clear concern for the experience of our guests at an event. And the coat checks have run smoothly at The Ball (with only minor exceptions) for the past 11 years.
The Ball: Checking your coats smoothly since 1997.
No more crazy coat checks ever!
The One in Which We Blow Off Jon Stewart
(This is the 10th Day of our “12 Days of the Ball 2008” series)
At the first Ball in 1995, I wanted to try to do something different, so we took over the upstairs “Michael Todd” VIP Room of the Palladium (which, if I recall correctly, held 800 people) and tried to turn it into a comedy club for the night with small round tables, spotlight, the whole deal.
Stand Up NY, with whom I had a good relationship, helped us get comedians for the night and they did a great job. We had Scott Blakeman, who is kind enough to still give us a shout out, Elon Gold who later starred in the wonderfully-named TV series Stacked with Pamela Anderson:
Elon Gold interviewing Elon Gold as Jeff Goldbum
Jeffrey Ross, now the “Roastmaster General” at the Comedy Central / New York Friar’s Club Roasts, truly one of the funniest comedians this side of Chris Rock, and who, by being less well-known that Dane Cook, helps disprove the notion of an essential fairness in life:
Jeff Ross roasting William Shatner
(Not Safe for Work)
And Susie Essman who, as Susie Greene on Curb your Enthusiasm, was the first to make “You fat fuck” a term of endearment:
Warning: NSFW again
No one was more surprised than me when it actually worked. The Michael Todd Room actually looked and felt exactly like a comedy club and there were no glitches at all. People loved hanging out in the huge Palladium club for a while and then being escorted to their private tables in our comedy club upstairs.
Nervous in my first foray with the press, I tried to explain to a New York Magazine writer I thought these comedy shows came off really well. Unfortunately, I was quoted as saying as something to the effect that “it was the best thing that ever happened on Christmas Eve.” Although I may have struggled with my words, I certainly didn’t say that. Two billion Christians have a fatwa out on me to this day.
The following year, I tried to expand the concept by bringing in a Jewish comic with an even bigger name and was pumped up when I reached an agreement with an agent at the William Morris Agency to have Jon Stewart perform at The Ball for $10,000. Now, we were big-time!
Big-time for about ten minutes, that is. Because when I called my friends to report my coup, they all greeted me with these three words: Who’s Jon Stewart? I had failed to realize that this was 1996 and that Jon Stewart was only well known to the pop culture obsessed.
This left me with Indecision 1996: Should I book this relatively unknown comedian who I knew would be great but who apparently had little promotional value? Or should I go back on the oral agreement I had with the agent at William Morris.
Ultimately, I didn’t believe I had any real choice but to do the latter. Our new company couldn’t afford to pay $10,000 for talent unless we would likely get some of that back by attracting additional attendees to The Ball. The William Morris agent was pissed, as he should have been. I felt terrible and it was both the first and last time I ever backed out of a deal (wish I could say the same for the many club managers with whom we’ve dealt).
So now when you see Jon Stewart, pointing forlornly to that “Oscar-hosting” thing as his career highlight, perhaps you will can spare some empathy for a sad clown left forever to lament “What could have been.”
Coming tomorrow: The One Where We Blow Off a Bunch of Irish Rockers Calling Themselves “U2″
About This Blog
Welcome to our blog. We have some exciting stuff coming up in the next few months, including the release of Tribester.com, our new social network connecting fun, interesting Jewish professionals and, of course, our biggest events of the year including The Ball 2008 on December 24 - the Nation's Biggest Jewish Singles Event.
We’ll use this blog to let you know what we’re up to and also to give you a little “inside baseball” - a behind-the-scenes look at the sometimes very "interesting," things that happen when you work with nightclubs as we do.
We’d also like to use this blog to hear from you, your ideas about our events, about what features you’d like to see in Tribester.com, and about single life in the ’00s and online dating / social networking, in particular.…
Jeff Strank is the Founder of LetMyPeopleGo.com
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