All the world's a...swamp?!

It has now been 3 weeks since the first flood of the parking lot and the subsequent flood of the crawl space and basement costume shop.  We are still pumping water out and desperately trying to save the costume inventory from mold and mildew.  It's a sad, sad situation and in the end, the Players will lose a substantial amount of inventory - much of it irreplaceable vintage clothing.  Ultimately, it will be a loss to the whole community, as those will be costumes that will not be available for the wax museum, or the high school musical, or to any one of a hundred community events.  We haven't been able to do much with the costumes for the last 18 months as we have been sorting and organizing and trying to find a way to make our storage system more accessible and the flooding is essentially the nail in the costume shop coffin.  It's no longer a matter of convenience or organization: now it’s a matter of health and safety.  We desperately need to build an above ground, environmentally controlled costume storage space. 

A new costume shop facility has been on our list of delayed maintenance for a very long time.  With the risk of dangerous mold spores higher than ever before and the sheer monetary cost of losing so much inventory, a new costume shop has to be a priority.  Every show the Players put on increases our costume inventory. Every children's camp production, every main stage production, every fundraiser, every concert.  And when I think of the time and effort that goes into the creation of every costume, and that costume just being...destroyed by our inability to keep it safe...it makes me want to scream.

I am putting this project at the top of my "to do" list.  I know that the economic climate we live in today is not one of financial largesse but this theater has meant a lot to a lot of people over the years - me included - and I will just have to keep my fingers crossed that together we will be able to resolve this problem.  In the meantime, please be patient with our inability to commit our meager costume resources to the full spectrum of community use.