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Dirty-South Blues Harp forum: wail on! >
Gussow/Shellist Orlando CANCELED
Gussow/Shellist Orlando CANCELED
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kudzurunner
4540 posts
Feb 08, 2014
6:16 AM
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Ronnie and I have cancelled the Orlando workshop scheduled for March 8th, with great regret. Below is the complete text of the email that we have just sent out to our registrants. Since the purpose of this thread is to inform rather than disparage, and since an honest accounting of why the event was canceled required us to deliver some uncomfortable news about a member of our blues harmonica community, I am locking this thread after I post it. Ronnie and I simply want to make you aware of what happened.
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From Adam and Ronnie to our Orlando workshop registrants:
We're sorry--truly sorry--to inform you that we are canceling the March 8 workshop. We will be refunding your registration fees over the next several days, and we will be giving you an additional peace offering, which we'll describe below. Please accept our sincere apologies for any and all inconvenience this cancellation may have caused you.
You certainly deserve an explanation.
We are canceling the event for two reasons. The first reason is lack of sufficient enrollment by the cutoff date (today) that we established when, several weeks ago, it became clear the preregistrations were running considerably behind what we expected. (Several people canceled the moment we sent out an emergency email on Thursday morning.)
The second reason, which ultimately determined the outcome, was the failure of the third member of our team, R.J. Harman, to complete the task that he volunteered to take on: organizing and overseeing the evening blowoff at the Legendary Why Not Lounge. The venue was not at fault, as we mistakenly stated in our last email. The venue had in fact never agreed to host the evening event on Saturday, March 8th--a fact that became clear after Adam had several email exchanges and an extended phone conversation with the venue manager yesterday. The venue has a longstanding contract with a highly profitable comedy event for every Friday and Saturday night. Displacing this particular client, a key profit center for the venue, was never even a possibility. RJ misunderstood the venue manager back in November and never confirmed the gig, nor did he provide us with contact information for the venue. Ten weeks later, this past Wednesday, he discovered his error.
RJ feels bad about his failure to execute his part of the plan, and he has asked us to share the following statement with you:
Dear Harmonica Friends
I’m so very sorry for the disappointment you guys may feel due to the canceling of the harmonica workshop. I’m here to not only apologize to my two heroes in the harmonica world but to my friends who I let down so very badly.
I take full responsibility for this event coming to a close. I didn’t complete my side of the buiseness in the time that needed to be done. I hope that this hasn’t caused toomuch damage to all of you amazing players and friends I hope to meet one day.
I apologize with everything that I have and can’t say how sorry I am for any hurt I’ve caused. Again I take all repercussions....
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kudzurunner
4541 posts
Feb 08, 2014
6:16 AM
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...and hope one day forgivness can be given for my wrong doing.
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An event like this is time-sensitive. People who might register need time to make plans, and they deserve to get what they signed up for. We are both extremely grateful for those of you who immediately reached out to us, on the heels of our recent email, and offered help of various sorts. But when we weighed our options, we both agreed that steering this particular ship in a new direction and with a new crew, at this late date--one month out, and with countless details to be ironed out--was too risky a proposition.
So we are, with considerable regret, canceling the workshop.
As a way of making it up to you, beyond simply refunding your registration fees, we are going to give each of you the following:
1) half-price admission to ANY future Gussow/Shellist workshop
2) $20 credit from each of us towards the digital products that we sell on our respective websites, ModernBluesHarmonica.com and Harmonica123.com. This includes video lessons, tabs, albums, jam tracks: any digital product that we offer. Just contact each of us once you've visited our websites and tell us what you'd like. We'll quickly send it to you.
We're really sorry about all this. We appreciate RJ's willingness to take responsibility, but we understand that our own professionalism is on the line here as well, and that hurts. We'll do our best to make it up to you--hopefully with a rescheduled event in central Florida at some point in the future.
sincerely yours,
Adam and Ronnie
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