Klarinet Archive - Posting 000172.txt from 2004/01
From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Re: Dallas arts funding
Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2004 08:17:20 -0500
Well, here are my two cents: Arts patrons' motivations vary, and the
public statements aren't always the whole story. In 1967, after two thirds
of a freshman year in college, I temporarily dropped out of the University
of California at Berkeley and spent an extended summer working as a "girl
Friday" through Echelons Office Temporaries, in the then-newly-opened
Lincoln Center offices of the Metropolitan Opera's fund- raising
organization, the National Council. It was the so-called Summer of Love,
and there I was, headed across the continent in the *other* direction, from
California to New York, to one of those bottom-of-the-barrel, starving
student, minimum wage, dead-end jobs. It was an exciting place to work
then, nevertheless, because the job came with one huge perk: To put on a
good show of butts in the boxes, the Met made empty boxes available to Met
employees free of charge, seat by seat, on a first-come, first-served
basis. (Sometimes, when I sat in Rudolf Bing's box or one of the other
important ones, I noticed people scrutinizing me through their opera
glasses. I wondered if they ever recognized me as a regular or figured out
why I shuttled from box to box. Alas, I couldn't get away with pretending
to be a mysterious courtesan making the rounds. Wearing the same homemade
dress every week would have given me away.)
At any rate, that job gave me an inside look at the patrons. They varied.
Yes, many of them donated because they loved opera. They used their seats
constantly and made sure to give tickets to friends when they couldn't be
there themselves. But, other patrons, including some of the biggest
donors, never used their box seats after opening night, and I do mean
never. They used the opera donation as a tax write-off. They'd rather
give the dough to the opera than to the IRS, because being seen at the
opera gala was good for business and good for social status. Some hated
the music and even said so to anybody who'd listen (even said so to me, a
total nobody whose name they couldn't remember), but made sure to go to the
parties and stalk the press photographers, and then get another line of ink
in some gossip column by bitching about the photographers stalking them. I
never heard of anybody on the Met staff yielding to the temptation to quote
the real reply that more than one patron gave when asked for a quotation
for a press release: "Oh, just make something up." The "quotation" always
came out to be a heart- felt tribute to the joys of philanthropy and the
social value of the arts, of course.
One extraordinarily wealthy woman who phoned the office about something or
other said to me, in an absent-minded voice, something like, "Put me
through to the Secretary, sweetie. I just talked to my lawyer about my tax
s***, and I'm upping my donation -- as long as I don't have to go dress up
in f***ing ostrich feather panties and listen to the f***ing opera to get
my write-off. LAAAAAYAYAYAYA!" -- that last being a triple forte yodel
worthy of Florence Foster Jenkins. One of the real secretaries saw me
suddenly jerk the phone reciever out at arm's length as my eardrum nearly
burst. After I'd passed the call along to my boss, the real secretary said
cynically, "Was that Mrs. X? She does that every year. Better you than
me, sweetie. She did call you sweetie, right? Did she give you the line
about the mink-lined bra, or was it the ostrich feather panties?" (Don't
ask me who she was, btw. I won't give out that info, even in private
e-mail, because her family still donates prodigiously to the arts, and I'm
not about to do anything that could put the kibosh on that generosity.)
Well, what that gal gave the Met every year would buy enough ostrich
feathers to take care of "Aida" and a whole lot more operas, so frankly, my
dear, none of us gave a damn if she called us "sweetie" or la-la-la'd holes
in our ears. And I'm not so sure she was as cynical as she pretended,
either. When you've got that much moolah, people climb all over you to dig
for it. You learn to protect yourself. The opera and the symphony at
least have the class to do the digging with the clean golden spoon, not the
rusty shovel.
Lelia Loban
E-mail: lelialoban@-----.net
Web site (original music scores as audio or print-out):
http://members.sibeliusmusic.com/LeliaLoban
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