Archive for May 9th, 2007

Some people are aware that I work at the Lied Center, fewer realize that we announced our season for next year. Inevitably every year we have someone complain that we have scheduled an event on a major religious holiday.

This year it happens to be 21 September 2007 , or on the Jewish Calender 9 Tishri 5768 ( ט תשרי ה’תשס”ח). This date I believe is Yom Kippur.

So this year I have a few people complaining about this. Now most of you do not realize what goes into creating a season. We don’t get to “choose” the date. We get to choose performances and they give us the dates they can come. Since many of these performers have similar availability (as they go from Dallas to Chicago, or from StL to Denver).

We have religious calenders for most religions, we try not to schedule events on those dates, but sometimes we dont have a choice.

Now that that is out of the way… What really pisses me off are the people who feel like you have greatly insulted them personally just for scheduling an event on that day. Last year we scheduled an event on a major muslim holiday, this year its a Jewish holiday…

I am trying to keep explaining the process to people of how we select the dates, but some people just don’t care… what is the culturally sensitive way to chew these people out for not considering the fact that we have six calenders to schedule against and we don’t always have a choice?