Sara Schwabe: Confessions of a webmistress in the making
I'm a singer, an actor and a director. I feel at home behind a mic, on a stage and in a director's chair. Computers scare me.
One of the incredible aspects of producing theater is that even though multibillion-dollar budgets produce spectacular Spectaculars with holographic helicopters, falling chandeliers or mountains that rise up out of the floor, the process is pretty much the same as in Ancient Greece. You can produce great art on no budget and with very little technology. After all, Aeschylus and Euripides didn't use HTML code to write and produce great works. Therefore, I'm going to blame my supreme lack of "techiness" on my years in the theater.
When I was approached about heading up the new knoxville520.com entertainment Web site, my first thought was, "How could I possibly be in charge of something so computer-y?"
Hell, I can barely manage the call-waiting function on my circa 2002 cell phone! (And forget about text messages!)
I'm the most technologically unaware person I know. Even my 78-year old grandfather has more computer savvy than me. In fact, he used his tech-sense to pimp out the new video iPod he gave me for Christmas last year. It's 6 months later and I'm still figuring out how to use the thing! Needless to say, I found the prospect of moving into the world of geeks, codes and dark offices more than a bit daunting.
However, with each step in the development of Knoxville520, the more the process began to resemble staging a theatrical production. In theater, you first decide on the story you want to tell. In this case, our "story" is sort of a Vaudeville revue of Knoxville nightlife -- a little bit of everything you need to know about what's going on.
Then you cast the show using the best (and hopefully the cutest) talent around. The knoxville520 cast consists of brilliant folks in my office, who have patiently guided me to the edge of geekdom, as well as gifted supporting characters -- dear friends who have agreed to lend their distinctive personalities to the Web site in the form of recurring blogs.
Finally once you've rehearsed, streamlined and polished your show -- worked out all the bugs and made sure your story is interesting, useful and enjoyable -- you throw a totally fantastic opening night party and hope that everyone and their brother (and sister, cousin, etc.) comes and loves what they see.
Not to blow our own horn, but I think that a pub crawl spanning the whole of downtown and the Old City is a pretty kick-ass opening night party, don't you?
So now we move into the extended run of this show called knoxville520. We don't have a cast of thousands, but we do have at least that much energy and excitement for what we can do for Knoxville entertainment. If we can provide you with a reliable place to get the low-down on what's happening in K-town, this show could be huge, baby. Vegas-huge!
Knox Vegas, of course.