The Dayton Philharmonic put on a wonderful concert at St Peters last week.  The performance was excellent and the acoustics of the church were perfect.  This was the first time I've been to a Dayton Philharmonic concert.  I had heard from friends that go to their shows often that they are a very good orchestra.  They are especially good considering the size of Dayton.  The architect that designed St Peters did a fabulous job as well.  Most of the city missed out on an opportunity to get $50 worth of entertainment for the bargain price of $8 for adults or $5 for seniors and kids.  What is even more of a shame is even though there were about 400 people that attended, there was still room for about 400 more.
 
I had totally misread the demand for this event when in January council first authorized staff to commit to paying the Philharmonic the $10,000 appearance fee they would receive for the performance.  I really thought there was a good possibility that council was supplementing the performance and then the only people that would hear about it and attend would be people that go to services at St Peters.  I was so mistaken in my thought process that I thought the performance would be full even if the only place it was announced was at St Petes.  This wasn't the case at all.  The city actually authorized staff to spend $6000 more dollars to publicize the event.  So residents had from January  through December to learn about and plan to attend this event.  For publicity, I saw the announcement in the Courier at least a month before the concert.  On concert night, I was shocked to see the Church was only filled to about half capacity.
 
This raises a lot of questions in my mind about if I could have done more to make sure that more or our residents got to take advantage of such an outstanding event.  First off I wonder if my concern about the council setting up the concert so that St Pete's could put on a nice event at taxpayer expense might have prompted the city and St Pete's to bend over backward to avoid the appearance of impropriety thus severely reducing the number of St Pete parishioners that got a chance to participate.  Empty seats obviously would not have been my objective.  My objective was always an equal opportunity for other members of the community to compete for those valuable but inexpensive (tax subsidized) seats. 
 
The next thing I wondered was if I should have realized that many of the seats were going to be empty.  I didn't see the announcement in the paper two weeks prior to the concert and I assumed it was because the city expected a full crowd.  I wonder if I knew that ticket sales wouldn't fill the hall if somehow we couldn't have gotten some of the kids in school band and / or choir "free" or sponsored tickets.  This would have been better than leaving all those seats empty.
 
Not sure if City Council plans on funding other such cultural events but now that we as a city have a little more experience with them hopefully we will get to maximize the experience for our neighbors and friends.