Calendar Promises Some Social Security
Ask any self-respecting Orange County socialite the date of last year’s Battle of the Balls and she’ll tell you in a flash, “Oct. 13 and 14.”
It was that memorable, dizzy weekend when actor Michael Caine was honored at a gala by fellow Brits, when Pacific Symphony staged concerts-cum-galas (with special guest, Princess Alexandra of England), when the Barclay Theatre opened, when the Rex restaurant opened with back-to-back charity galas, and when the Festival of Britain was launched.
“So many parties, so little time!” became the battle cry--good news for die-hard party-lovers and bad news for party-givers. While the bashes were all hits, no one doubted that the monetary rewards would have been greater had they been staged over several weekends instead of sandwiched into one.
Why the sequined free-for-all? Party planners thought the second weekend in October was a date with a safety net. The annual South Coast Repertory gala is held in late September and by mid-October ball-goers are looking for another chance to kick up their heels. Everybody had the same idea.
“That was when we knew we had to do it,” says arts activist Claudette Shaw of Newport Beach. “We had to create the publication we’d dreamed of for so long.”
Shaw and Nancy Coop, once a public relations practitioner for the Laguna Art Museum, have put together a publication called Orange County R.S.V.P, a bimonthly calendar of event listings they hope will help eliminate social scheduling catastrophes.
Available to the public for $60 annually (and to nonprofit groups for $30), the calendar will offer free event listings to all of Orange County’s cultural, political, civic and arts groups. Holidays and significant national and regional events will also be listed.
The publication, which will be launched in June, will also have an FYI column featuring articles by local community leaders. Advertising space will be available, with some of it in the form of a resource list for party givers (showcasing caterers, entertainers, photographers, florists, etc).
Coop and Shaw--whose partnership is called Clancy Publications--refuse to divulge the amount of money they’ve allocated to launch their publication. “I don’t like to discuss my personal finances,” Shaw says. But the women are confident there’s enough cash in the kitty to christen the project and keep it afloat for some time.
“We know it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme,” Shaw says. “But party planning in Orange County has always been a nightmare. There’s a need. We see this project as a personal commitment over a period of time.”
So did Benjamin Epstein when he founded Black Book in 1986, presently Orange County’s only comprehensive event-listings calendar for nonprofits. Epstein, who also does medical marketing and free-lance writing, began his venture with a $20,000 investment (representing 20 backers--Opera Pacific’s board chairwoman Floss Schumacher among them--at $1,000 each). The investors have received no return. “I’m only breaking even,” says Epstein, who lives in Newport Beach. “They’ll get a return on their money when I begin to make a profit.”
Black Book is a computer print-out, mailed monthly, which sells for $72 a year. It features event listings only. There are no ads. Nonprofit groups pay the full fee for their listings in the publication, which, in part, appears weekly in the Daily Pilot and the Metropolitan Journal newspapers. Black Book subscribers include the March of Dimes, Bowers Museum and Chapman College.
When Epstein was founding Black Book, Elizabeth Familian was founding Master Planner in Los Angeles. In fact, Familian had planned to create a Master Planner for Orange County, but when she learned that Epstein was preparing a listings calendar she withdrew.
Master Planner, available for $120 per month ($60 to nonprofits), has been so successful--display and classified ad revenues have brought in as much as $30,000 per month--that it was recently bought by Blair Publications. “They’re kicking off a Master Planner in New York in August,” says an insider. “And then in five other major cities around the country within the next year.”
You can’t take it with you? Too bad. When you’re the founder-president of Mandarin Gems, you wish you could take it with you, says Paul Lam, honorary producer of South Coast Repertory’s “You Can’t Take It With You,” which had its premiere night on Friday.
If he could take one thing into the afterlife, Lam says, it would be a treasured tourmaline rooster.
After his huge family, Carl Karcher would take a chili dog, he said with a laugh.
Anne Kaufman Schneider, daughter of playwright George S. Kaufman (who, along with Moss Hart, wrote “You Can’t Take It With You”) said she’d take “a beautiful black pearl from Mandarin Gems.” Of course she would. Schneider keeps busy promoting her father’s plays, she said.