Whoa. By Heidi

This morning at 12:15am we found out we’d be receiving an unexpected $20,000. We each have our own story of how we sleepily realized what had just happened (ask us about them someday, they are all pretty funny). Cue a series of ALL CAPS, multi exclamation mark, profanity laden texts, emails, phone calls, and Facebook threads.

By 1:15am a handful of us were at Grumpy’s giggling goofily into cans of Sofia Coppola champagne over jokes of label makers, Rubbermaid tubs, matching tattoos, branded converse tennis shoes, and a fleet of minivans.

By 6:15am the congratulations started to trickle in and we’ve begun to realize this is, in fact, real life.

This has the power to dramatically shift the way we make our work and will impact our guest artists and our audiences and it is AWESOME and it is TERRIFYING and it is HUMBLING.  What are we going to do? We’ll let you know as soon as we know.

But for now, the game is still (and always will be) the same. We make new, relevant theater for our community. We asked. You gave. You gave in $10s and $20s. You gave us your latte money. your snack money. your new shoe money. You told us our work is important and THAT’S just so big. “Thank you” hardly seems big enough but “Thank You” is what we have. We promise to take your precious gifts and use them carefully and thoughtfully. We promise to make work worthy of the trust you’ve placed in us.


So, to

Dale Howey, Rob Goudy, Chaun Webster, Christina Meckel, Dana Nelson, Angi Belsly, Richard Horton, Jacob Brensing, Megan Hadley, Jenna Papke, John & Susan McCabe, Patricia Ybarra, Joseph Halvarson, Andrew Young, Scott Pakudaitis, Jordan Bainer, John Bolan, Rebekah Swanson,  Jan & Steve Galitzer, Rosanne Swanson, Sara Hill, Mark Long, Emily Dussault, Lindsay Lewis, Susan Mahoney, Ryan Kroening, Kit Leffler, Ted Moore, Wendy Adams, Christian Erickson, Katherine Pryor, Jim & Connie Hamilton, Amanda Schnabel, Amy Ginther, Scotty Gunderson,  Amy Jedlicka, Michael Leffler-McCabe, Mary & Dan Holman, Mark Swanson, Andi Vargo, Kellie Wells, Mikell Adams, Laura Zabel, Daniel Carlsen, Stephanie Peterson, Tom & Sarah Borger, Ryan Curl, Mary Jane Pelletier, Gwethalyn Williams,  Pete Driessen, Katie Becker Colon, Karen Mestrovich Seay, Gretchen Boulka, Mercedes Sheldon, Sarah Johnson, Nick Haug, Adam Kruckenberg, Michael Conway, Blake MacKenzie, Cheryl Jedlicka, Tina Meckel, Susan Oviatt, Scott Reynolds, Ashley Hinrichs, Shawna Lee and 7 anonymous lovelies,

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.