[From www.sfcv.org]

For 36 years now, Vallejo Music Theater has been producing concerts,
musicals and training programs all over town, without the opportunity
to settle down. Until now.

The company is close to purchasing the town's historic Federal Building,
just $75,000 away, in fact, from meeting the half-million dollar price.
Here comes news of a "first," indispensable for fine journalism: VMT is
the first arts organization in the area to have bid on and won its future
home on the Web.

No, not EBay, but something close: the US General Services Administration
Real Property Disposal Division. Just in case your organization is looking
for a nice building, here's the address: www.auctionrp.com. VMT managing
director Judith Brown, a mastermind of this new-age real estate acquisition,
says the GSA folks have lots of good property there. The city of Vallejo,
Brown says, "has been promising a performing-arts center for 30 years
and nothing has come of it yet. We got tired of their fiddle-faddle, and
grabbed the brass ring when it came around."

To raise the remaining funds, Music Theater will throw itself a series
of fund-raising parties, with the dour title of "2003 Capital Campaign
Celebrations," but with a content promising mirth. Comedians Will Durst
and Celeste Franklin headline the first program on June 6, in the Masonic
Hall.  Dinner is catered, so help me, by Earl's Bar-B-Q, classical music's
most helpful 'burger-and-ribs provider. Information at
www.vallejomusictheatre.org.

David Ramadanoff's Vallejo Symphony will benefit from the restoration
of the Federal Building for Music Theater, being given the opportunity
to use the future concert hall for chamber-music events, auditions and
section rehearsals. It would be a great day for Vallejo if all music
organizations could come together under the roof of the building, but
the new facility will have only 280 seats, and the Symphony's temporary
home, Hogan Auditorium, holds 800, a minimum for economic feasibility.
(Hogan goes into retrofitting soon, for about eight months, and the
Symphony will end up in various area churches again.)

Music Theater's home-building is a remarkable grass-roots project.
When you raise a half a million dollars for the arts, help from a major
organization or a kindly philanthropist seems to be a minimum requirement.
VMT doesn't have one. Top contributors are not from the Getty or Packard
families, not by a long shot. VMT board president Scott Hanes says the
biggest single donation came from the Vallejo Suburban Kiwanis, which
raised $13,000 at a Monte Carlo night. At the high end of individual
contributions is $5,000 from Mary Tipp, in memory of her late husband,
a well-known Vallejo businessman and philantropist.

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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