From Shatter

Greetings and Salutations!
(that means Hello!)

Well finally I get to stop talking in the third person and directly express myself. After I spend too much time working on the web site, I end up sounding real clinical. WELL NOT HERE! This is where I get to be me. (those that know me are running for the nearest fallout/bomb shelter at the very mention of something this scary!)

FEAR NOT! For I only scare the weak, unless I havn't had a shower then I just stink.

As I stated, I'm the one who does all the things you may not notice. Sure, EVERYONE knows Gabe & Ronn, but who that guy usually hanging around the door in a big leather jacket with the Goatee & Moustache???

Yup, that's me. So sit back, relax, load up an MPG3 file and enjoy...I've got some new remixs I'm listening to from Razormaid Records' Seismic Sound series playing on the stereo (6 disk changer running through the line-in on my computer to my Yamaha computer speakers.. sounds GREAT!)

Gabe & Ronn originally asked me to do up a flier for them. I asked them what it was for and Ronn (my brother) said "It's for a party we're throwing." Me being who I am, thought this sounded good, as I like a good party. As things progressed I asked what was happening with Security, decorations, room prep, etc. One thing led to another....

When I designed the original flier, I was thinking "What to do... what to do.." I knew that the mood definitely needed to be positive, uplifting, high energy, etc. What better way to be uplifting than with clouds? Gabe and Ronn both loved it, and blue started to become the Escape theme color.

It would then follow that, since I dabble in HTML (understatement) that I decided to throw togather a web site. So, going with the clouds theme, and three hours later I had the original version of this very web site up and running around January 20th or so.

January 23erd. We show up late friday night to start prepping the place. First thing I said was "This has GOT to change... BIG TIME!" I Used some old tricks from my house party days when somebodies parents would take off and I would help throw rave style parties. We went down to Safeway, and I bought a LOT of aluminum foil. We started covering all the glass book cases with the foil (to detract from the shelevs, add reflectiveness, and discourage potential vandalism), as well as the ceiling fans (gives a nice look when stobe lights or other effects lighting hits them). I also bought a bunch of colored party lights to replace all the lights with. All they had was blue (fate?) which reaffirmed our blue theme for Escape. The one red light they had went for the phone/restroom area of the place.

Since I also work at clubs in San Fransisco I knew there were other things clubs needed: Water, snacks, coat check, etc. We got the details set and we were ready to go.

So there we were... Saturday the 24th of January. 7:30 and three people had shown up. 7:45 and now we were at 5. By 8:30 we had about 30. Stress was REALLY high. The clock ticked on...

Then at 9pm something happened: PEOPLE! The wave started.. the parking lot filled up, the lines formed and we had people! By the end of the night we had some 130 show up! SUCCESS! All this with 250 or so fliers and some word of mouth. Wow. It was off to a start!

Since then we've made several changes. No longer are we doing the $6/$8 pricing at the door. We decided to just go for an even $7 all night long. This last time I had the idea to run some video feeds. I started doing this in a SF Club last year and it worked great, so I knew it would work here. I am introducing Red Bull to the area which is a drink I swear by for energy recharging when you're feeling run down. I also brought my computer down to the last event and recorded a LOT of the mixes that were happening. As I type this I've completed the first encoding to MPG3 and am 7.83% done with the second one. I'm about to make the 8.5 x 11 flier for the April 10th date and am starting to concieve the Flier for April XX (it's a SECRET!) Escape.

Well, that about wraps things up for now. Hope you get a little bit of an idea about what's happening in the background with Escape. Shatter is indeed a real guy (there I go in third person again) who does all the little things you may or may not notice. If you're not feeling too intimidated, say hi me (back in first person) at the next event. Just do the usual "Are you Shatter???" ...

I get that ALL the time...

RAVE ON!

Note from April 10th: "Nobody came up and said hi to me. Well, Richard Lindsy did, and I havn't seen him in years. But nobody else did. I'm crushed. Really. Totally. Ya, crushed."

Hahahahaha..... :)