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chaquir asked in one of my other posts about why there are less shows in the summer and the fall for Phoenix Swords than in the Winter and Spring.

It’s a good question. You’d think that the summer and early fall would be a great time to be outdoors and see sword fighting shows.
So, why isn’t that true?

2015 is the 14th year we have been doing shows. For the first 7 of those years, 6 of the 7 we did do more shows in the second half of the year. That one year we didn’t we only had one more in the spring. (This is a bit unfair. We started the troupe in the second half of the year so couldn’t have done shows in the first.)

For the second group of 7 years, 6 of the 7 we did more in the first half of the year. That one year we only had more in the fall. (This is a bit unfair. We’re only 7 days into the second half of the year and have only had the chance to do one show. We will do more…)

After 7 years of show something happened that flipped our year.
If you look at the numbers you can see something big happened to our number of shows in general at that point:

If you look at it as the change to average the flip is more obvious:

Yeah, late 2008 into 2009 we lost more than 1/3 of our shows. Most of them from the second half of the year.
That economic slow down really hurt Phoenix Swords.
And, to some extent still does.
Practically all of our smaller shows just vanished.
Birthday parties, weddings, anniversary parties and all other things like that just stopped.
We had some booked in the fall of 2008 that called us and said "I just lost my job, I can’t afford to hire you for my kid’s birthday party when I’m not sure I can make rent." Got more than one of those calls…

We had a bunch of shows that repeated each year. You can see we kept more spring ones and added some new ones, and lost almost all the ones in the second half of the year.
First half:

Second half:

Even that probably isn’t clear.
But, when you look at the list of places we’ve performed it becomes even more clear.
This is a list of locations where we’ve performed multiple times. I’ve only included the ones we did more than 5 shows.

The #1 place we’ve performed at is a place where we haven’t done a show in 7 years. It was a night time July show that ran 3 of the 4 weeks.
After 7 years of not doing it, it is still the place where we have done the most shows.

That was what we used to do in July. The show never came back.
Last year we had a job in August. It didn’t go the best and we aren’t doing it again this year. We may get a small fire show in August, we’ll see.
Our September shows have folded and none have replaced them.

October we’ll be doing a Halloween show.
November we should be back in Alabama.

I’d like it if the second half of the year shows came back. But, after 7 years…