©2020 Meg Bashwiner
I am a tour manager. I manage the live tour of The Welcome to Night Vale podcast. We do around 60 shows a year in 17 countries and 37 states. The work is incredibly rewarding and incredibly tough. The oath I swore when I took on this role was: Nobody gets hurt. Everybody gets paid. It is that oath that has keep me going on the toughest of days and it is that oath that has led to our most incredible days.
Those six simple words make me get up from my budget hotel bed in the morning to drive a 12 passenger van for 7 hours. They make me agonize for months on end to find the most efficient tour routing that will make us the most money without exhausting us to the breaking point. They make me scrounge google maps to find the one vegan restaurant in a rural midpoint drive through town. They give me the will to keep going when I don't think I can anymore. I have a mission.
Nobody gets hurt. It is my responsibility to take care of everyone on my tour. I make sure they have a clean bed to sleep in each night, a sober, experienced, alert driver to ferry them from stop to stop, healthy food in their greenrooms, and a safe stage to play on every night. We check in every morning. We make birthdays special. We go out for family meals. We take days off. I make emergency dental appointments. I buy cold medicine. I always have a bandaid, an Advil, an Imodium, and an extra granola bar at the ready.
Everybody gets paid. My performers are paid a competitive rate, they get a cash per diem and cash for dinner every night we have a show, my assistant gets a day rate for every day we are on the road regardless of whether we have a show and a get a per diem and dinner money on show nights too. Our shows employ local workers, from ticket takers and popcorn poppers to lighting and sound engineers, runners and promoters, security guards and cleaning crews, merch sellers and parking lot attendants. The artists who design our merch are paid a royalty on every item sold. The valet guy at the hotel gets $5 every time he hands me my keys. Then there’s the hotel desk clerks and the flight attendants, the housekeeping staff who I leave a few bucks for next to the card where they have handwritten their name so I know there’s a person behind the clean sheets. Then there’s gas stations and the airline gate agents who give me shit about our oversized bags. The local restaurants that fill up with our fans before the show and the waitresses who roll their eyes when my tour van full of half dressed tattooed weirdos unloads in front of their rural restaurant at lunch rush, I tip them like a Rockafeller. And there’s, our booking agents who always earn their 10% by sending hundred of emails to line up my dream routings. There’s our merch printer who turns my money into more money by converting it to t-shirts and posters drop shipped all around the country, deftly wielding the alchemy of fed-ex. And the fed-ex driver who handles our poster boxes with care- sometimes. They all get paid.
I’ve worked in the arts for long enough to know that everyone deserves to get paid, how rare adequate compensation is and how lucky I am to be able to make something that can pay them for a portion of their worth. I know that my work is helping people make their way in this world which makes being away from my family sting just a little bit less. Knowing that my people will have a place to live, that they can save for weddings and vacations, pay off debts and work on other projects for fun without financial pressure makes 6am van calls and having to shit at rest stop everyday worth it.
Last week at the start of our 19 stop spring tour I had to decide between nobody gets hurt and everybody gets paid. I picked nobody gets hurt. Although, I know that without getting paid my people will most certainly be hurt. We will be able to pay them a little bit, but not enough. I also know that its too late and that some people will still get hurt.
For now I am home from the road, staring at a non refundable empty tour van in my driveway, the theaters are dark, the popcorn remains un-popped and I wake up every morning to my failure in my own damn bed. I have failed to uphold my oath and I will have to live with that as I work to rebuild. I plead to audiences around the world as you clamor for refunds and express disappointment, please be kind to your local theaters, they are doing their best and a lot of them will not make it through this. All I can offer is a plea to those in power to think more like a tour manager, to take responsibility like a tour manager—to wake up every morning with the simple mission of nobody gets hurt and everybody gets paid.
Featured on the Our Plague Year Podcast