Hopefully, previous posts about Arts Advocacy (www.theatreface.com/profiles/blogs/advocacy-for-the-arts-do-it) have stoked the fire and gotten you motivated to keep your job (after all, this is a fun business to be in). In the academic environment it is particularly important to let the administrators and the parents of your students know that working in the theatre is not all fun-n-games. They call this 'Show Business' for a reason: It is a business! It's all about business. El Arte Para Deniro! How much business? Lots! Can you say BILLIONS of dollars? Sure you can.

Most people think that the elves and the fairies come in the night and build those sets, write those scripts and sew all those costumes. Sound?, Lights?, Video? That's just a bunch of kids foolin' around with camcorders and stereos. Right? Well, it turns out that some folks at the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts - www.arts.gov) put pencil to paper and actually researched how much moolah we stimulate each year in the economy. Look-up NEA Research Note #102, published April 2011. Its titled: Time and Money: Using Federal Data to Measure the Value of Performing Arts Activities (www.arts.gov/research/Notes/102.pdf) This is a 32 page document that can provide you with serious ammunition for fighting-off budget cuts.

Some of the Key Findings:

• The U.S. performing arts industry is supported by nearly 8,840 organizations with a total of 127,648 paid workers.
• These organizations generate nearly $13.6 BILLION in annual revenues.
• Americans recently spent an annual total of $14.5 BILLION on performing arts admissions. If you add movie theater and sporting event admissions, this is over 44 BILLION dollars to 'see a show'. Remember: Sporting events and movies all have sound, lights, video, costuming, & other theatrical elements, too! And this doesn't count the BILLIONS involved in TV production - you typically don't pay an admission price to watch the idiot box, so it's not figured into the mix.
• On any given day, 1.5 million Americans attend arts performances, usually with family or friends.

If you compare this to the small number of professionally paid sports players (10 on a basketball team, 12 on a football team, etc.) it becomes fairly obvious that you are much more likely to find a job in the entertainment industry than you are playing pro sports (unless, of course, you want to be the guy that launders the sweat-socks).