Add another show cancellation to the 2020 season… This was one of our consistently productive shows too, a small specialty in Pennsylvania with a group of Cavalier owners that is usually our way to get through a relatively slow summer (kind of hard to photograph dogs outdoors in the summer with scorching heat, and relatively unpredictable MD afternoon storm potentials) which is still looking to be semi productive if we can stop having these shows cancelling due to this Covid 19 shit. More importantly it’s fun to be able to see clients who are nice, and clients who have become more like family than just friends.
The July local show we vend at cancelled a few weeks ago, leaving us with nothing through the end of July when we may or may not get to go to Vermont for an Agility show with another group that is becoming like family.
It’s really hard for a business to stay open when our labs are partially closed down to be able to sell art prints even, we can’t get to see clients in studio or on location (and to those photographers breaking the stay at home and out still photographing, please stop), and we can’t even really set any up because most of our clients aren’t sure when their next paycheck is coming in to be able to budget for a shoot.
But aren’t there small business grants and loans? Yes. The Federal ones are already taken up, because of large businesses using loopholes to count locations with less than 500 employees at that location as a “small” business, not to mention some were somehow able to file before the loans opened for PPP. The federal loans also changed many rules in what was supposed to be able to be given after many were already applying or had applied for other of their small business loans, and many of them don’t count if you are a self employed sole proprietorship. Luckily Howard County Arts Council has a small grant to help artists who work in a gig based business to be able to get a little bit of help and were able to help us out, but it’s less than 65/month stretched between March, April, May and June’s bills :-(.
We hope that this doesn’t go much longer and someone realizes that maybe we should let things happen soon, and let people make their own decisions to stay home if they don’t want to go out. We will take a show making 1/3 of our averages, over not being able to do anything at all and bringing in 0 with bills piling up quickly…