Thanks to 80 (!!!) of our email list guests for responding to last week's survey to help us plan for a safe return to live house concerts later this year. Here's a quick summary of your feedback for each of the topics we asked about, followed by our "plan" for restarting later this year:
Your Feedback:
Vaccines are important. About 90% of you made it clear you won't feel comfortable attending a house concert until you are vaccinated; many of you also said you'd only feel comfortable if everyone present, including the artist, is vaccinated.
Food & socializing is a big deal (which, in a way, reinforces one of the main reasons we host these shows, but that's another story). Almost everyone had something to say about about food & social time. You all value it but recognize the need to be cautious and safe.
About 75% of you are concerned about social distancing & masks, with most folks preferring social distancing and masks for everyone, including the artist.
Only about 60% of the responses expressed a preference for indoors vs. outdoors, with slightly more of you preferring to remain outdoors when we start back up.
A large majority of (but not all) respondents are comfortable with the idea of a shared bathroom
So - with all the appropriate caveats around "we don't know what's going to happen", here's our current thinking about when and how we'll restart live house concerts.
The COVID numbers need to come way down and stay down for awhile. Hopefully the vaccines will help with that (and soon!).
Public health experts like Doctors Fauci, Osterholm, Jha, & Inglesby need to start saying it's safe to gather in small groups again (and Maryland needs to make it legal to do so).
Vaccines must be available broadly to all age groups.
We'd love to hear from you on whether you'd be ok if we asked you to show us your vaccination card when you sign up to attend in person. Drop us an email with your thoughts
Once those three things are in place, then we start looking at weather (if we start up again during the summer, we would try to do a few shows outside).
Whenever we do start back up, it will be with smaller numbers initially, social distancing and masks for everyone, Our hall bathroom will be available with plenty of sanitary wipes. And, we'll likely have some pretty carefully controlled "before/after the show" socializing rules to help keep everyone safe.
And, as we've mentioned a few times before, we'll be offering a "simulcast" live stream of our house concerts (with the artist's permission, of course) so that folks still not comfortable attending in person can join in via a high-quality live stream of the concert from our living room or backyard.
More details on all of this over the coming weeks ...