Most of the weekend was fine, but I seemed to have developed a bad cold while I was sitting minding my own business yesterday afternoon during the BPAA soiree. Fortunately I'd already played at this point, but I hightailed it out of there as soon as the program was completed, skipping the socializing so I could get back home for Mother's Day part 2. Moreso than the first soiree, there was actually some real playing yesterday, with some very good accounts of Scriabin and Barber, on a Steinway that was fairly new but not too stiff, which was also nice. I played the Suite Francaise d'apres Claude Gervaise by Poulenc, which clocked in at about 11 minutes. Some people were up there for closer to 20, so it was a longish afternoon.



As part of this competition thing they're sponsoring next month, they want to sell raffle tickets for a few prizes that have been donated, including a Bose Wave Radio and a Sony portable cd player. But the tickets cost $5, so I evaded taking any to sell. When the Chorale had a raffle over 10 years ago, I couldn't sell $2 raffle tickets, and while now $2 may not be so bad, I still think $5 is too much to expect your average person to want to cough up for an organization's fundraiser that isn't exactly a public charity. It's kind of like passing around a birthday card for somebody you know but no one else knows, and asking for $5 donations to buy them a nice gift. At least selling fruit the buyer gets something out of the deal no matter what. But it's a new group and they'll figure it out. They want to sell a thousand tickets, I think if they can get past 200 they should consider it a success. There's also some weird laws about raffles that actually don't require people to pay money to get a ticket, sort of like a sweepstakes giveaway where you read in the small print "no purchase necessary", although I guess they can make it more of a pain to get them without paying, since that's what those Mcdonalds-type contests will do. Given the cost of the ticket, the prize should be of a commensurate value, so a $300 radio isn't really that great of a return on a $5 chance, either. But maybe I'm just jaded by 12 years in the Chorale trying to sell people stuff. The only thing that ever worked consistently was fruit, and that requires a certain amount of infrastructure that I don't think this group is ready to take on yet.