You Know The Orchestra, Opera, And Ballet Are In The Fiscal Doldrums When...

...they turn to bingo and pull-tabs for a regular fund-raising source.

Really. No joke.

The Louisville Orchestra, Kentucky Opera, and Louisville Ballet all run weekly bingo games, with a 'pull-tab' operation on the side, to help fund operations.

Five years ago, the orchestra signed on at Bingo City, a hulking, blazingly lit space in Breckenridge Mall that once housed a department store. The opera and the Louisville Ballet have come on board during the past few months. Now, bingo regulars can attend an opera session at 10:30 a.m. Thursdays, orchestra sessions at 7:30 p.m. and midnight Thursdays, and a ballet session at 2 p.m. Sundays.

It's tempting to get preachy at this point, lamenting how these great organizations have muddied their hands with gambling, etc. etc., but OldSouth will resist the temptation.

Orchestras, operas, and ballet companies are, by definition, money-losers. They have always depended upon patronage from the wealthy quarters of society. The Austrian composer Haydn spent most of his career in the employ of the Esterhazy family, for example. Nothing new there, and nothing wrong. The Heinz family underwrote arts in Pittsburgh, the Fords in Detroit (and elsewhere), and more recently, the Ingram family fortune has fueled the high arts in Nashville. The great American arts institutions were built with private dollars, not tax money, and rightfully so.

What this presupposes, however, is the existence of businesses that operate profitably for long periods of time, which allows for the accumulation of wealth; wealth which can be reinvested, bequeathed and inherited, and eventually given away to worthy causes. This also presupposes a society in which new businesses can be born and succeed, to keep the cycle going.

It also presupposes that the orchestras, operas and ballets continue to prove their value to the community, as opposed to other needs such as hospitals for children, universities, medical research, orphanages and development needs in impoverished parts of the world. (Let's see, I can use this 50k to fund three performances of Giselle, or it can dig twenty wells and buy twenty thousand doses of medicine for HIV patients in southern Africa...what should I do?)

We now live in an economy that makes that long-term build of wealth much more difficult, its retention and transmission more fraught with hazards, coupled with a world of needs that make the purchase of a set of alpenhorns for next year's Ring Cycle seem relatively low on the list of priorities.

Thus, bingo for the arts, in a city that once prided itself on its generosity towards those activities, and enthusiastic attendance of them. It was a part of civilized and educated life, open to one and all. As the arts organizations increasingly isolated themselves from life around them (abetted by the unfortunate subsidy of tax dollars), the culture went on without them. Who needs Beethoven, when you've got the NBA?

We have both a cultural and economic quandry.

The bingo games are simply symptomatic.