Story time
A while back, I was working as a promoter of The Rakes End, a art and music venue in Cincinnati, Ohio.
I was well known for taking weird ideas and making successful events out of them.
I had pretty decent success for a while and started to get a little over confident...
That's when I came up with the new party idea: The Cat Fashion Show.
Originally, the idea was for people to bring their cats and put them in a pageant. I thought it'd be hilariously chaotic and be fun for everyone involved (minus any cat owner narcissistic enough to actually bring their cat to a bar) I drew up the pitch and had set a few backup plans (expecting that no one would actually bring their cat to the bar) including offering a contest to the best cosplay of their cat. I found some bands to play the event and sent the roster to my designer.
Needless to say, the bar owner HATED the idea and told me I was not allowed to have cats in the bar. I found this hilarious, but fine, fair enough, I took the idea back to the drawing board to try to come up with a new pitch. Finally, we decided that we would just have people bring in pictures of their cats and have people vote for the finest feline. The winner got a $50 petsmart gift card. A friend of mine then decided that we would make a cat themed DJ duo specifically for the event. We used projection mapping to project animations we made of cat DJ's on the stage while we DJ'd over by the soundboard behind a curtain. It was a great idea in theory, but I'll get back to that.
Needless to say, way more people were actually expecting to bring their cats to the bar than we had anticipated and were disappointed by the fact that there were no actual real life cats involved in the event. Still, a few people did show up with pictures, but not quite enough to justify the cost we paid for the prize. We awarded the prize anyways to one of the 5 people who actually participated.
The night was a complete disaster. The animations didn't work properly, the sound was out of wack, and of the 200+ rsvps, only about 30 people showed up. It got a lot of buzz, but overall was a complete failure.
That is the story of my first, and last, cat fashion show.
I hope you all enjoyed this story, if you'd like to read more of my tales of musical adventures, please subscribe and leave me a comment telling me what you'd like to hear about. Thanks for reading!
-Squares
