The Send a Kid program

Before a student ever boarded a matinee bus, someone had to pay for the seat. The file keeps two pages for that fact: an education-outreach hub describing artist visits to area schools, and a send-a-kid page naming the donors who turned reduced-price tickets into a standing program. The matinee was the result; these two pages are the machinery behind it.

What the dispatch presented

The outreach page explained a program older than the file itself, offered since SOPAA's inception and, before that, under the Concert Association that preceded it: touring artists either traveled to local schools for question-and-answer sessions and master classes, or met students at the Vern Riffe Center itself, before or after a performance. The send-a-kid page told a narrower story, how one gift became a standing discount.

What the record kept

The send-a-kid page names its own origin precisely: an anonymous individual donated five student concert series tickets, hoping area students would come to appreciate the fine arts and grow into future supporters. The page then lists nine area organizations and businesses that grew the gift into a reduced ticket price for all area students on selected shows: Fluor/B&W, Innovative Solutions, Kiwanis Club Wheelersburg, OSCO Industries, Rotary Club Portsmouth, Solid Rock Construction, Sun Coke, USEC, and Wolfe & Wisniewski.

What the program was for

A matinee seat and a Send a Kid seat solved two different problems. The matinee got a school bus through the door once a year; Send a Kid was the presenter's open invitation to any family that could not otherwise afford a season ticket. The file's own language is plain about the hope: participation in the arts enriches lives, and a discounted seat today was a subscriber being grown for later.

The artists who came to the schools

The outreach page dates its own visits by season, which lets the file read five years of names: Terry Barber, countertenor, in December 2015; Alash, the Tuvan throat singers, that October; the Acting Company's stage combat workshop and CutTime Simfonica across 2014 and 2015; Jenny Lin and the ensemble Cordis the season before that. Each name is an artist who spent part of a tour date in a classroom rather than only on the Vern Riffe stage, the same room the matinee crowd and the evening subscribers shared.

Nine names on one page

The send-a-kid donor list reads like a map of the town's economy underwriting its own children's seats: an energy contractor, an industrial supplier, two civic clubs, a construction firm, a plant operator. None of them bought a program credit the way the season's sponsors did; they funded a ticket price instead, which the file preserves as a quieter, more specific kind of giving than a logo in a program.

The program in this file

The outreach and send-a-kid pages are filed together because they are one program read from two directions: artists coming to the students, and money bringing the students to the artists. The matinee bus, filed elsewhere in this record, only explains how a school got in the door; these two pages explain who paid for the door to be open and who stood in front of the classroom once the students arrived.

Filed this way, the program also marks the file's clearest argument that the presenter thought past its own seasons. A reduced ticket price that started as five donated seats and grew to nine standing donors is a decade of small, renewed decisions, not one gift remembered once. The record keeps the growth, which is the more unusual thing to find preserved.

The artist visits complete the picture the matinee alone could not. A bus brought a class to a seat; an outreach visit brought the stage to a classroom. The file's keeping of both, named by season and named by donor, is the fullest account this archive has of the presenter building an audience it would not see for another decade.

What is not shown

How many students used a Send a Kid ticket in a given season, what the discount actually cost compared to full price, or whether the program outlived the file's last captured years. The record keeps the gift's origin and its growth; the attendance it bought was never itemized.