Kalyn Rose Heffernan has played shows all over the world and never been asked about her accessibility needs. 

“It’s wild to me,” said the emcee frontwoman of hip-hop group Wheelchair Sports Camp. “Wheelchair is in my band name. All of my pictures are me in a wheelchair. And you wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve been placed at a festival upstairs.”

Wheelchair Sports Camp has been a sonic staple in Denver for over a decade, and they’ve played the annual Underground Music Showcase a handful of years during that time. In 2022, Youth on Record, a nonprofit music organization that Heffernan works for, took over partial ownership of the festival. The ownership agreement came with a commitment to audit and overhaul the festival’s accessibility strategy. Heffernan was the obvious first call.

Growing Denver’s largest music festival

The Underground Music Showcase, a three-day, multivenue festival with nearly 200 acts, bubbled up in 2001 at the Bluebird Theater on Colfax. For a few years the showcase — which started with four bands for $5 — bopped back and forth between the Bluebird and the Gothic Theater in Englewood, until 2006, when it settled into its current location, a six-block strip of South Broadway. 

Over its 23-year run, the festival has changed hands from Denver Post reporter John Moore (now the arts and entertainment reporter at the Denver Gazette), to the Post’s then-music critic Ricardo Baca (now of the marketing agency Grasslands), to The Denver Post itself through the paper’s community foundation, and finally, in 2018, to its current co-owner, the marketing agency Two Parts.

Two years ago, Youth on Record, a nonprofit music organization, got in on the action. 

Youth on Record had received a surprise, unrestricted $1 million donation from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott in 2021, which Jami Duffy, executive director of Youth on Record, wanted to put toward building a “musician middle class.” That meant investing in things like professional development, higher wages and more opportunities for young musicians “to get in front of people,” Duffy explained. “So I looked at that and said, why don’t we see if that’s possible under UMS’ umbrella?”

Putting accessibility in writing

In March 2022, Duffy met with Casey Berry of Two Parts at the late-night hang Sputnik and inked their new co-ownership deal. Part of the ownership agreement included an accessibility audit, conducted by Youth on Record. 

They didn’t get straight to it. During Youth on Record’s first year of co-ownership, they had “some other things to focus on,” Duffy said. They set up sober bars, created a “care lounge” for artists to recharge away from the noise, and started Impact Days, a two-day industry-focused conference for musicians to learn and network.

Then it was time to hire Heffernan.

“Kalyn’s always been such a leader for accessibility rights. She’s a huge advocate in our community. She works with kids. And, bonus points, she’s also a well-respected career musician,” Duffy said. “So there was no better option locally.”

They also brought in Jessica Wallach, an accessibility consultant and artist who sometimes uses a scooter to get around. Together, Wallach and Heffernan conducted a comprehensive audit of every venue at UMS. 

“Just by us rolling through these places, and knowing little tricks, I think we were able to explain the accessibility of places in a way that hopefully other people are going to benefit from,” Heffernan said. 

“You know, like, ‘the door is heavy, but once you get in, it’s nice and open. The bathrooms are accessible, but the sink is high up.’ Weird shit like that.”

Together they compiled the festival’s first accessibility guide, which details everything from where to find water (for concertgoers and service dogs alike) to what the floor is like (the stage at Goodwill has freshly paved concrete, the stage at Punch Bowl has potholes). This year’s guide is 31 pages and can be downloaded ahead of time in regular or large print, and can be read at the festival in braille. 

“Ability is temporary”

The goal is to make bigger changes in the coming years, like building raised platforms at the main stages, creating low-sensory spaces where people can take breaks, hiring American Sign Language interpreters, and looking into alternative modes of experiencing music, like vibrating haptic suits that allow wearers to feel the music. 

But all of that costs money. Duffy is looking for an additional $50,000 next year to specifically address accessibility needs. 

“Something Kalyn taught me that has stayed with me is that ability is temporary,” Duffy said. “At some point in most of our lives, we will experience a disability, whether that’s temporary, long-term or forever. It could be because of an illness, because of an accident. You know, there’s all kinds of things that can happen. So ensuring accessibility for people with disabilities means that everyone is being taken care of.”

For now, the accessibility committee — headed by Wallach and Heffernan — is focused on providing an abundance of information so people with access needs know what they’re getting into. Along with the accessibility guide, they will have on-site coordinators and a tent with ear plugs, water and power strips to charge wheelchairs. 

For Heffernan, working with UMS “really filled a void. And like, (quieted) the rage,” she said. “It’s frustrating at times. If I don’t say something, nobody will, and if I say something then I’m working within all these trade-offs,” she said, referencing the inaccessible shows she’s gone ahead and played, but that upset the disability community in the process. “What a dream world it would be to just make my art and play music.”

In Western music, songs played in a major key are generally thought of as happy songs, while songs played in a minor key are heard as sad songs. William Trevizo, a 22-year-old violinist, likes to play in the minor key.

“Not necessarily because the songs are sad,” he clarified. “Because they are more emotional.”

Music is an emotional affair for Trevizo, especially when he plays with his mariachi bands. He started learning violin by mimicking the trumpets in his father’s mariachi band, and now plays with both his father’s band and with the student group at MSU Denver, where he studies music performance and music education.

Performing at Metropolitan State University pushes Trevizo to concentrate — the songs are complex, “hard music,” he says. On stage he primarily concentrates on technique. 

But when he plays mariachi music, he can relax, observe, feel. He watches the way a love song pushes couples to embrace, the way an upbeat song lifts a crowd to dance and the way a song dedicated from son to father can move both men to tears. 

“I am able to feel what those people are feeling,” he said. “Like I am transmitting this (sound), and they are transmitting that (emotion). So there’s like this connection through music, through this language without words.”

On April 19 and 20, Trevizo will play with both of his bands at Viva Southwest Mariachi, a two-day conference and festival in Denver. 

More than 25 local mariachi bands and folklorico dance groups will perform on the first night of the event during a free gathering they’re calling Festival Garibaldi, a nod to Plaza Garibaldi in Mexico City, the symbolic home and festive hangout of the city’s roving mariachi bands. The evening will end with a community jam session.

On April 20, the acclaimed Mariachi Cobre will perform at the King Center on the Auraria campus. Proceeds from the concert benefit mariachi education programs.

In schools and on stages

Mariachi typically consists of strings, trumpets, a lead vocalist or two, and occasionally a set of drums. The music emerged in central Mexico as folk music performed in and by the community.  Eventually it evolved into a soundtrack for celebrations, like weddings, birthdays and baptisms.

That’s largely where it still is, at least in Denver, according to Isahar Mendez-Flores, founder of the Colorado Youth Mariachi Group. 

“It’s hard for people to know that there’s this thriving mariachi community here, because even though there’s so many groups out there right now that are working, it’s very much gig-based,” she said. “It’s a passion, but above everything else, I mean, it’s a job.”

Festivals like Viva Southwest are helping push Colorado’s many mariachi bands into the spotlight. That exposure is important for younger generations, Mendez-Flores said. She wants her students to strive to perform on stages and in concert halls, like the Colorado Symphony Orchestra.

Though the concerts will be fun, celebratory events in the evenings, the meat of the conference is the free workshops for educators interested in starting mariachi programs in schools.

Mariachi has a big presence in schools closer to the Mexican border — high schools in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas are known for their highly skilled, and highly competitive, student mariachi groups. 

Though it has taken awhile, that level of performance is slowly making its way into the Colorado school system. In February, the Colorado High School Activities Association hosted the first mariachi festival for high school students from around the state. 

But they still have a long way to go.

“The numbers are tricky,” Mendez-Flores said. A mariachi band only has a handful of people, which doesn’t square with a 25-to-35 student classroom. There’s also the number of teachers it could require — someone to teach strings, another to teach brass, another to teach vocals and a fourth to teach culture, she said. 

Then there’s the instruments the school would have to purchase, the uniforms and the books. “So I know that there’s a desire and there’s a need for mariachi education, but I don’t think that school systems are quite ready to understand what it’s gonna take to make it happen,” she said.

“Mariachi is still the base”

Dr. Lorenzo Trujillo, affiliate professor of music at MSU Denver, started playing mariachi music simply because it excited him. Then he started to think about its lineage. 

Trujillo grew up under his aunt’s influence, a boundary-pushing singer who performed “in the ballroom with the square microphones,” Trujillo said. She combined their Mexican heritage with American classics, bounding from “Solamente Una Vez” straight into the English version, “You Belong to My Heart.”

As he progressed from playing family gatherings to celebratory gigs, his appetite for depth grew. “I wanted more,” he said. “That morphed into working with community groups, and then, here’s the real crux of it all: I wanted to give people, but most importantly youth, a sense of pride in themselves. In their parents, grandparents, ancestors. And to give them a sense of belonging here in Colorado. That we are part of the tapestry and mosaic that is Colorado. We’re not foreigners, we’re not people that should be told to go home.”

The future of mariachi will likely feature an even deeper blending of cultures. Trevizo said there is a slight division between mariachi musicians who believe it should stay traditional and folk-like, and those who want to expand it by incorporating contemporary influences. He identifies as the latter. 

“Mariachi is still the base,” he said. “If we’re able to share it with more people who might like it this (new) way, I think that’s better, because it’s still spreading mariachi culture.”

Ultimately, whether it’s a traditional song or a contemporary one, whether it’s played in a backyard or on a stage, the music is about connections — to a culture, to a past, to each other.

“We’re all connected somehow, through the music, right?” Trevizo said. “Like, when you’re in an orchestra, everybody comes together to make something. And when you’re in a mariachi group, each person has their job. There’s the percussion part of it, the bass part of it, the melody part of it. Without one another, it would just not be the same.”

Quick links: The anti-scalping experiment | Denver inflation and an extra $1,206/month | Colorado home prices up but…

Last year, tickets to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival sold out in less than three hours. It was the 50th anniversary festival, so organizers were expecting high demand, but when they scrolled social media later that day they found a more insidious reason for the quick sales: ticket scalping.

“(Scalpers) have systems. They have bots and things set up that’ll just go on attack during a sale. They have so much force that they’re getting in before people that are actually like waiting in line with their one computer,” said Grace Barrett, director of communication and partnerships for Planet Bluegrass, the production company behind Telluride Bluegrass Festival.

Colorado is one of a few states with a law that actually, and inadvertently, protects ticket resellers, by preventing venues and promoters from applying terms to the original purchaser of a ticket. In other words, once someone — or something — buys a ticket, they are free to do with it however they want.

In a 2023 bill, lawmakers tried to revise the lack of consumer protections by making it legal for venues to cancel tickets bought by bots or by individuals who have previously created fraudulent tickets. Gov. Polis ultimately vetoed it, but the Telluride Bluegrass team was taking notes.

“We looked at big festivals, like Coachella and Bonnaroo. But there wasn’t much there,” Barrett said. “Right now, we are wanting to do more (to combat scalping) and there isn’t a template for that.”

They ended up settling on a two-week pre-registration period, followed by a one-week scalper screening period.

Anyone who wants to attend the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in 2024 was instructed to purchase a $10 pre-registration ticket between Nov. 14 and Nov. 28. After pre-registration closed, Geoff Wickersham, sales and box office manager for Planet Bluegrass, teamed up with See Tickets to weed out any suspicious registrants.

Telluride Bluegrass mails wristbands to its attendees, so one of the easiest red flags to identify was multiple email addresses leading back to one mailing address. Other red flags were using multiple credit cards for one email address, and computers with hidden IP addresses. Everything was done manually using “Excel wizardry,” Wickersham explained.

“It’s a pain-in-the-butt week, but it makes my whole year go so much better if everybody’s happy,” Wickersham said. “So it’s worth it.”

The anti-scalping experiment

On Dec. 7, the festival launched its first round of ticket sales. Anyone who successfully made it through the screening process received a code that morning, which they used to enter themselves in the main ticketing queue.

Last year, without the pre-registration process, there were 12,000 people waiting to scoop up tickets on the first day of sales — the festival’s maximum capacity is 12,000. This year, there were just under 6,000 people waiting.

During the screening period, about 150 accounts were identified as fraudulent or suspicious. Those accounts were refunded the $10 charge and sent a notice that they would not receive a ticket queue code. If an account was flagged in error — a typo in the email address, a misunderstanding about the rules — the festival team made sure it was corrected, as long as the registrant had a good explanation.

Finally, this past Tuesday, the festival team quietly removed the password barrier from the ticketing queue. “It’s not a secret,” Barrett said, but the team is still trying to avoid any marketing blasts that a scalper or a software could pick up on.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ consumer expenditures report showed that last year, for the first time in five years, metro Denver households spent less on arts and cultural events than the national average — about 4.9% of overall expenditures, compared with the 5% national average. Attendance at cultural events has also declined from its pre-pandemic levels, down about 15% from 2019 in metro Denver, and 22% elsewhere in the state.

A variety of factors contribute to these decreases, including inflation driving higher costs of living in general, but when talking about concert ticket prices, two factors are repeatedly brought up: service fees and secondary markets. (Telluride Bluegrass doesn’t charge service fees.)

Barrett said Planet Bluegrass is happy to sell out a festival, but prefers selling out to people who care about it, “people that have made a community around it,” Barrett said. “It’s really important that the tickets are in the hands of the festivarians. So, I would love to see more festivals, concerts and people doing this, but I guess we’ll kind of just see what happens.”

Parker Yamasaki | Reporter

HELP US: If you’ve encountered any creative models to prevent ticket scalping or huge reseller markups, send Parker Yamasaki an email: parker@coloradosun.com. She’d love to hear about other venues and festivals getting creative — and promises to forward alternative models to the Telluride Bluegrass team.

Inflation update: Denver prices up but rising slower

If you’re still feeling a pocketbook pinch, it’s because inflation still exists. But perhaps, less so? Prices in the Denver metro aren’t going up as fast as they were a year ago, slowing to 4.5% in November.

That’s also lower than September’s annual inflation rate of 5.4%. Denver’s inflation rate is still higher than the U.S., which was 3.1% in November and down from 3.2% in October.

What does that mean for Coloradans? Try $1,206 more per month, according to Common Sense Institute, a conservative think tank in Greenwood Village that tracks fiscal policy. CSI’s measure comes from adding up three years of inflation for a cumulative total on an average household’s monthly budget. Since 2020, inflation is up 18.9%, according to CSI.

Now, many Coloradans probably adjusted their spending as prices went up — swapping chicken for beef, skipping a vacation, dining out less, etc. And the average wage has also gone up during that period by 16.6%, which means wages haven’t kept up with inflation.

But dollar-wise, that 16.6% pay raise translates into $1,820 more per month per household, CSI estimated, so rising incomes can cover the extra cost of inflated food, housing and energy bills. But it’s not quite like that, said Cole Anderson, a CSI research analyst.

“To be clear, this doesn’t mean that wage growth outpaced inflation,” Anderson said. “A household’s consumption bucket will always be less than its earnings without incurring debt. That inflation is outpacing wage growth means that the relative difference between the two is shrinking, which is eating into people’s savings.”

There’s also debt. And Colorado has the nation’s third highest median credit card debt, at $3,106, according to financial data site WalletHub. Coloradans are feeling the pain even if our average household income is at $87,598, according to the U.S. census data.

At least, Anderson pointed out, the past two months showed that prices may be dipping. The Denver area’s consumer price index dropped one-third of a percentage point since September, the first time there was a two-month decline in a year. Notably, the November report saw two-month price declines for the following:

• Gasoline, down 20%, with electricity down 0.5%
• Meat, poultry, fish and eggs were down 6.7%
• Non-alcoholic beverages, down 1.7%
• Food prices overall, down 0.6%
• Apparel, down 2.5%
• Transportation, down 3.4%

But in the past two months, these categories saw prices increase:

• Fruits and vegetables, up 6.1%
• Dairy products, up 1.3%
• Dining out, up 0.6%
• Housing costs, up 0.7% (the owners’ equivalent of rent was up 1%)

Whether this will continue, that’s hard to say, he added. The dips don’t point to any “structural changes that would allow for persistent price drops going forward,” he said. Besides, he added, “energy and household utility prices account for a large portion of the basket of goods that is used to calculate overall inflation, and these energy/household fuel prices are determined globally.”

Tamara Chuang | Business/Technology Reporter

➔ There is no Colorado inflation rate. A statewide rate doesn’t exist, remember? The BLS only calculates urban areas like Denver, though many economists believe inflation is likely higher in rural areas because the cost of living is higher when one lives farther away from grocery stores, which in turn, have higher costs to keep stores full.

➔ Economic crystal ball: Nearly two years of interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve to tame 40-year-high inflation made new mortgages, car loans and other debt much more expensive. High interest rates chilled the economy but not so much to push us into recession. The nation’s GDP is still expected to grow next year and with that, the Federal Reserve kept rates the same when they met this week — and could cut rates three times in 2024, reports The Wall Street Journal. >> Read

Sun economy stories you may have missed

➔ Colorado’s underfunded schools may finally get funded. The state has a poor track record for per-pupil spending. Sun reporters Brian Eason and Erica Breunlin explain how a new proposal may get Colorado to the level required by the state constitution for the first time in 14 years. >> Read

➔ Xcel Energy just got $3B cut from its budget. The Colorado Public Utilities Commission scaled back Xcel’s ambitious — but costly — plan to build new green energy generation and new transmission lines around the state. Mark Jaffe has more. >> Read

➔ Christmas trees are getting expensive. Blame the Great Recession for cutting supply, which has driven up wholesale tree prices, Clare Zhang reports. >> Read

• Catch up: The High Cost of Colorado

Other working bits

➔ Why are Colorado home sales prices still rising? Simple answer: There aren’t enough houses for sale, as homeowners sit on the sidelines until they can afford to sell. Fewer houses push up prices. In November, the median sales price was up 2.6% in Colorado and Metro Denver from a year ago, the Colorado Association of Realtors said.

“And, while interest rates dipped … (it) was not nearly enough to motivate potential sellers to abandon their locked-in low rates and add to the inventory of active listings, which are down more than 20% in the Denver-metro area and -12.5% statewide over the same time last year,” CAR said in a statement. In Denver, the median-priced home sold for $600,000, and statewide, it was $1,000 less, at $599,000. At least overpaying is less of an issue: Sellers are getting 98% of what they asked for. >> See Colorado, Denver Metro data

➔ DIA begins building new aviation training facility. Denver International Airport broke ground this week on its new Center of Equity and Excellence in Aviation, a facility to train underrepresented workers for careers in aviation. It’s also a place for small businesses to learn more about working with DIA to get construction, concession and other service contracts. CEEA will be part of the airport’s Great Hall Program and occupy 38,000 square feet on level four of the hotel and transit center. The Great Hall is expected to be completed by 2028. >> More

➔ Free dental checkup Dec. 23. Ahead of Christmas Eve each year, Comfort Dental opens up its offices for Care Day and offers services to those in need of dental care. And it’s not just one location, but any of its 180-plus nationwide, which includes about 100 in Colorado. This year, the Lakewood-based dental practice is partnering with Organización Papagayo in the Denver area to reach newcomers from El Savador, Guatemala and other South American countries. Offices open at 7:30 a.m. Dec. 23 and services are provided until noon. >> Details, locations

Thanks for sticking with me for this week’s report. Remember to check out The Sun’s daily coverage online. As always, share your 2 cents on how the economy is keeping you down or helping you up at cosun.co/heyww. ~ tamara

Miss a column? Catch up:

• Colorado dodged a recession in 2023. But what about in 2024?
• What a Colorado town of 600 residents plans to do with a $500,000 grant to attract visitors
• It’s not always about GDP, especially in areas like northwestern Colorado
• Boulder County adopts new minimum wage starting in January
• The number of open jobs in Colorado is a sign the labor market may be stabilizing
• Colorado’s unemployment rate has risen to 3.2%. Here’s why that’s “not significant”
• Didn’t know Colorado is a leader in clean energy and quantum? A Tech Hub designation could change that.
• What Colorado’s population will look like in the future

What’s Working is a Colorado Sun column about surviving in today’s economy. Email tamara@coloradosun.com with stories, tips or questions. Read the archive, ask a question at cosun.co/heyww and don’t miss the next one by signing up at coloradosun.com/getww.

Support this free newsletter and become a Colorado Sun member: coloradosun.com/join

The first concert Jonathan Kahn ever attended at Red Rocks Amphitheatre was Loggins & Messina in July 1976. Nearly 50 years later, Kahn is parked in the lower south lot of the iconic outdoor venue, sitting in the doorway of his Sprinter van with a Snarf’s sandwich, waiting for a storm to blow through before he heads inside to hear Hiatus Kaiyote and Masego. 

Kahn said he had been to five Red Rocks shows this year, shaking his head slightly — that number used to be a lot higher. 

Kahn isn’t the only one who has slimmed down his annual concert intake. Overall attendance at cultural institutions across the state is down, according to the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts. In a survey of 285 cultural institutions, attendance between 2019 and 2022 decreased by 15% in metro Denver and 22% in Colorado outside of metro Denver. 

Some of that dip is due to the fact that some people still don’t — and may never — feel comfortable attending events with large crowds after the pandemic. But more of that dip is attributed to the fact that entertainment is “a want not a need,” said Brian Kitts, Denver Arts and Venues spokesman. People adjust their spending according to what they feel they can afford. And when the cost of living is up in every other aspect of life, the amount that people are willing to spend on tickets to concerts, plays and museums goes down.

High Cost of Colorado

Our new ongoing series put reporters with all kinds of Coloradans to talk about their challenges, their fears and their solutions to the rising costs of living here. READ MORE

In 2018, the share of a person’s overall expenditures on arts and entertainment was 6.1% in metro Denver, significantly higher than the national average of 5.1%. In 2022, that percentage was 4.9%, lower than the national average of 5%. In dollars, this equates to roughly $500 per person per year less in spending. 

Some experts anticipated a post-COVID price jump that artists and promoters would use to offset lost revenue from the pandemic. That was true in 2021, when ticket prices increased about 15% at Red Rocks and nearly 45% at the Denver Coliseum. But this year the average price decreased from 2022’s averages, indicating a leveling-off of ticket prices. 

Still, the increase in the average ticket price over the past five years is significantly higher than year-over-year inflation rates. For instance, the average price of a ticket to a Red Rocks concert has grown 31% since 2018, while inflation for metro Denver is about 24% over that same period.

The most dramatic change to ticket prices comes from the introduction of service fees. Prior to the 1980s, when Ticketmaster launched, venues paid the ticketing servicer. But Ticketmaster flipped that model, paying venues in exchange for being hired to handle ticketing and then passed the costs on to customers in the form of service fees.

Since these fees are somewhat arbitrary — hashed out in negotiations between the ticketing service, the concert promoter and the venue — service fees as a whole have generated a new rising cost for concert-goers independent of inflation or post-pandemic economics. The opaque charges add to the frustration of spectators upset that outside forces are gouging their entertainment budgets.

Below we’ve pulled together some of the ticket price trends over the past five years, and laid out the cost of a night at Red Rocks based on three different budgets. 

A&E spending | Ticket prices | Cost of Red Rocks | Service fees | Heard in the crowd

Cost of a night at Red Rocks based on three budgets

How much do you have to spend on the night?

UNDER $100 (barely)
Ticket: $64.80 + $23.32 in fees
Transportation (RT from Union Station): Drive Gas: $2.22 Parking: Free
Tailgate: King Soopers 6-pack of Modelo: $8.99 + tax
Merch: Who needs it? Free
Bites: Ate dinner at home Free
It’s raining: Brought a rain jacket Free
Drinks: Snacks made you thirsty, fill up the reusable water bottle that you brought from home. ** Free
TOTAL: $99.33 + tax

$100-300
Ticket: $64.80 + $23.32 in fees
Transportation (RT from Union Station): Shuttle RRX Shuttle: $50
Tailgate: King Soopers 12-pack of New Belgium Voodoo Ranger IPA: $17.99 + tax
Merch: Band tee Short-sleeved T-shirt: $55
Bites: Hot dog Hot dog: $6.50
It’s raining: Buy a poncho  Poncho: $4.78 + tax
Drinks: The hot dog made you thirsty, think about buying a water bottle, but then see it’s 50 cents cheaper for a Red Bull. Go with the energy drink.  Red Bull: $5
TOTAL: $227.39 + tax

$300+
Ticket: $64.80 + $23.32 in fees
Transportation (RT from Union Station): Rideshare Uber Black: $151.68 + tip
Tailgate: Terminal Bar at Union Station 2 cocktails: $26 + tax and tip
Merch: Band tee and a record Short-sleeved T-shirt: $55 Record: $45
Bites: Ship Rock Grille* Chimichurri Steak Tacos: $13.50 Ship Rock Margarita: $12.50 + tax + tip
It’s raining: Stay at the grille, order another round of cocktails.  Another round: $12.50 + tax and tip
Drinks: Had a cocktail with dinner, but…what’s a loaded lemonade? Order a double.  Loaded Lemonade: $18
TOTAL: $422.30 + tax and tip

UNDER $100 (barely)
Ticket: $64.80 + $23.32 in fees
Transportation (RT from Union Station): Drive Gas: $2.22 Parking: Free
Running total: $90.34
Tailgate: King Soopers 6-pack of Modelo: $8.99 + tax
Running total: $99.33 + tax
Merch: Who needs it? Free
Running total: $99.33 + tax
Bites: Ate dinner at home, brought snacks Free
Running total: $99.33 + tax
It’s raining: Brought a rain jacket Free
Running total: $99.33 + tax
Drinks: Snacks made you thirsty, fill up the reusable water bottle that you brought from home. ** Free
TOTAL: $99.33 + tax

$100-300
Ticket: $64.80 + $23.32 in fees
Transportation (RT from Union Station): Shuttle RRX Shuttle Shuttle: $50
Running total: $138.12
Tailgate: King Soopers 12-pack of New Belgium Voodoo Ranger IPA: $17.99 + tax
Running total: $156.11 + tax
Merch: Band tee Short-sleeved T-shirt: $55
Running total: $211.11 + tax
Bites: Hot dog Hot dog: $6.50
Running total: $217.61 + tax
It’s raining: Buy a poncho  Poncho: $4.78 + tax
Running total: $222.39 + tax
Drinks: The hot dog made you thirsty, think about buying a water bottle, but then see it’s 50 cents cheaper for a Red Bull. Go with the energy drink.  Red Bull: $5
TOTAL: $227.39 + tax

$300+
Ticket: $64.80 + $23.32 in fees
Transportation (RT from Union Station): Rideshare Uber/Lyft Uber Black: $151.68 + tip
Running total: $239.80 + tip
Tailgate: Terminal Bar at Union Station 2 cocktails: $26 + tax and tip
Running total: $265.80 + tax and tip
Merch: Band tee and a record Short-sleeved T-shirt: $55 Record: $45
Running total: $365.80 + tax and tip
Bites: Ship Rock Grille* Chimichurri Steak Tacos: $13.50 Ship Rock Margarita: $12.50 + tax and tip
Running total: $391.80 + tax and tip
It’s raining: Stay at the grille, order another round of cocktails.  Another round: $12.50 + tax and tip
Running total: $404.30 + tax and tip
Drinks: Had a cocktail with dinner, but…what’s a loaded lemonade? Order a double.  Loaded Lemonade: $18
TOTAL: $422.30 + tax and tip

* Temporarily closed
** You are allowed to bring water bottles in as long as they are empty when you arrive, airport style.

Joshua Zabatta spent weeks mentally preparing himself to testify about his experiences singing with Opera Colorado before the National Labor Relations Board. The Denver-based tenor had never done anything like this before.

“I had a ton of anxiety,” said Zabatta, who has performed with Opera Colorado on and off in chorus and some solo roles since 2016. “I had a feeling that the cross-examination would be difficult. So I had to make sure I could hold my own, and be poised and grounded during the whole process.”

The public hearing was held for three days over Zoom in late June. The order of business was a petition, filed by the American Guild of Musical Artists, or AGMA, requesting to hold an election for arts workers to vote on unionization at Opera Colorado. 

The move to unionize at Opera Colorado comes as another opera company in the state faces allegations of union busting and saw the sudden departure of its president and CEO in the midst of its summer festival. The circumstances of the two local institutions also land in the midst of a wave of U.S. workers demanding better from their employers. From employees at coffee shops and large tech companies pushing to form unions to UPS workers prepared to strike over better wages, particularly for part-time labor. The arts are certainly in the mix, including a near work stoppage among backstage workers that would have halted Broadway and national touring productions and the double strike in Hollywood. There seems to be a moment, “an awakening” as some have called it, among performing artists advocating to have their labor be better valued and protected. 

Zabatta felt the choristers at Opera Colorado were not being compensated “what we’re worth,” especially in a city with a high cost of living. But he had been on the fence about whether he should testify. The opera world isn’t known to be friendly toward those who speak up about problems, and he was initially concerned what his participation in the hearing could mean for future opera opportunities. 

“It’s the irony of being in a profession where you make noise with your vocal cords, but then you don’t feel like you have a voice,” he said. “It’s always jarring.”

In the end, he got some words of encouragement from his husband, friends and colleagues. 

“I think, deep down, I knew I needed to do it,” Zabatta told The Colorado Sun.

Organizing at Opera Colorado

Opera Colorado was once a signatory of the labor union for U.S. performers and staging staff who work in the opera, dance and choral sectors, according to AGMA records. The last contract in the union’s archive is from 1985, plus an agreement extending that collective bargaining agreement to 1988. The union has reported some correspondence between Opera Colorado and AGMA from the ’90s, but no documentation of subsequent agreements or records explaining why the relationship dissolved.

On May 22, a little more than a week after Opera Colorado wrapped its 2022-23 season with Puccini’s “Turandot,” AGMA announced that Opera Colorado artists had signed their cards to unionize, again. 

“By coming together in union, we look forward to securing the best possible opportunities for our artists and for the organization for many years to come,” organizing artists said in the announcement.

The union seeks to create a collective bargaining unit of solo singers, chorus members, stage directors and assistant stage directors, stage managers and assistant stage managers, performers who have speaking parts or are narrators, choreographers, solo and ensemble dancers, and those in Opera Colorado’s Artists in Residence program.

According to Opera America’s most recent Annual Field Report, Opera Colorado is one of 33 U.S. professional opera organizations within Opera America’s membership that has an operating budget of $3 million or more. Of those, 21 are listed as AGMA shops on the union’s website. 

Opera Colorado declined to voluntarily recognize the union, prompting AGMA to file an election petition with the federal labor agency June 1. 

Adam Da Ros, who also testified during the NLRB hearing in June, worked at Opera Colorado as an assistant stage director for “The Shining” in 2022 and “Turandot” this year.

“What we’ve been talking about is trying to preserve the good things that are there. And there are a lot of good things. I would say generally Opera Colorado is a good place to work,” Da Ros said. “It just feels like there’s a disconnect with some groups and how their time and their efforts are being valued.”

He said unionizing could help empower those who feel disenfranchised, “rather than each of us existing as a single person who then might not feel like we can voice our concerns or that the organization might retaliate against us or just simply not not hire us back.” 

Zabatta couldn’t pinpoint exactly what lit the fire for unionizing, but did recall growing frustration among some chorus members when rehearsals ran over, when breaks weren’t respected or when choristers didn’t get much notice about updates to music. 

“I think there were just a bunch of little things maybe that were adding up, and made us say, ‘Hey, they’re not really considering us the way they consider other people,’” he said.

There’s been a modest improvement to chorus pay since his first show with the opera in 2016, and the choristers now receive travel stipends to help cover costs such as parking, he said. But fair compensation remains a concern, and Zabatta felt like “there was no opportunity for conversation” to broach these issues with Opera Colorado leadership.

Opera Colorado’s director of marketing and communications Jennifer Colgan said in an email that the organization is not making any public comments at this part of the process. 

But the organization’s lawyers have argued that the union’s proposed bargaining unit is “inappropriate” and the potential members “do not share a community of interest.”

The employer post-hearing brief, which The Sun obtained through an open records request, said the worker classifications detailed in union’s petition are a mix of independent contractors and “casual” employees contracted for a single production at a time, making them ineligible to form a union. 

“The performers and other individuals engaged for each production are essentially itinerant artists and individuals who work for themselves and market their skills, talents and experience to multiple opera companies and other performing organizations across the country,” the brief said. 

AGMA’s attorneys wrote in their post-hearing brief that there’s precedent in opera for their proposed unit and each of their positions are key to Opera Colorado’s ability to present opera.

Opera Colorado identified chorus singers as volunteers during the hearing, saying the administrative staff have long viewed the choristers this way, the union said in its brief. Union representation, the company argued, threatens to “end community theater.”

Zabatta read the hearing transcripts and said he was disappointed by statements from the opera’s leadership describing choristers as community members who participate in productions for fun or as a creative outlet. While the pay is a modest — about $550 per production including the travel stipend — Zabatta said the chorus members are still paid and many of them are serious, highly skilled musicians. Zabatta teaches piano and voice and does some work as a piano technician, but considers singing the primary aspect of his career. 

“That is not at all the messaging that [Opera Colorado has] sent us for years,” Zabatta said. 

Opera Colorado’s website says the company brings “world-class opera to Denver and beyond,” and Zabatta noted that works like “Turandot” and Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” in the upcoming season are challenging and demanding repertoire for the chorus.

“It’s not a volunteer corps, if you’re doing productions that require that caliber of musician,” he said.

Central City Opera accused of trying to union bust

About an hour west on Interstate 70 from Denver, the 2023 summer festival season at Central City Opera was drama-filled — and not only of the standard onstage variety. 

In February 2022, Central City Opera announced a big change in its leadership: Longtime company leader Pelham “Pat” Pearce Jr. shifted to the role of artistic director and the opera brought in Pamela Pantos to serve as president and CEO. 

The first summer festival under her tenure marked the 91-year-old company’s return to the historic Central City Opera House after pandemic first shut down live, in-person performances. But as artists and staging staff began arriving in the small mountain town to begin rehearsals, there appeared to be a lack of clarity on COVID-19 protocols, in particular around testing. Multiple workers told The Colorado Sun that they company did not provide tests and masking was initially optional; one worker said every other opera they had worked with since the pandemic was firm on the issue. Some tried to talk to management about it, but felt their concerns went unheard.

Workers began getting sick in June, but they were able to carry on with performances. In late July, the number of positive COVID tests was so high among workers onstage, backstage and in the orchestra pit that the opera canceled a week’s worth of shows. 

“It got really out of control,” said Da Ros, who worked that summer as an assistant stage director on one of the mainstage shows. 

Last summer, workers were also preparing to negotiate the next collective bargaining agreement with the opera as the contract they were operating under was set to expire in August 2022. Central City Opera has claimed that “AGMA actively allowed its contract with Central City Opera to expire.” Yet email correspondence from early July, reviewed by The Sun, showed AGMA representatives informing workers they hoped to begin negotiations later that month. Those dates ended up coinciding with the COVID cancellations. 

Alternate dates in August were discussed, but those didn’t work out either, eventually pushing negotiations into late fall, past the contract’s expiration. 

“Even if it’s expired, it still remains in effect. So it’s not the Wild West once you hit the expiration date,” said Ned Hanlon, who served on the Central City Opera negotiating committee and AGMA’s president as of June 1.

AGMA collective bargaining agreements contain a clause clarifying that contracts don’t become moot when they expire, and, in general, U.S. labor law requires a “status quo” until a new agreement is reached. This means that under the National Labor Relations Act, no parties can make unilateral changes, absent bargaining to impasse, on key issues such as wages, hours, benefits or critical work rules.

Once the negotiations did get underway, things soured quickly. Each party brought in outside counsel, with Central City Opera hiring Littler Mendelson, the same law firm Starbucks used to fight unionization among its workers. Hanlon said Central City Opera’s initial proposal was nothing like he had seen before: it sought to remove pay-or-play, a “bedrock of AGMA’s artists contracts” that guarantees agreed upon compensation whether the artist goes onstage or not; it also added language that allowed the company to subcontract certain work, such as dancers,, even for positions within the bargaining unit.

Some workers were concerned by the omission of something known as the successor clause, a provision typical of AGMA contracts that ensures if a company disbands then restarts or is absorbed into another organization it would still adhere to the already established agreement. 

“That’s when we realized that artists were really under attack at this company,” Hanlon said. 

Typically artists who have currently or recently worked with the organization will sit on the negotiating committee. But the fear of retaliation among artists was so high the union put out a call to its elected Board of Governors asking members to help fill out the committee. 

Tense negotiations went on for months, with allegations of withheld and delayed pay for artists looming over them. 

“It was rough, those negotiations were awful, and there were so many of them,” said De Ros, one of the few artists on the committee who had worked with Central City Opera. 

The union filed multiple unfair labor practice claims with the NLRB, several of which remain open, including allegations of surveillance and coercive action, failure to provide requested information, bargaining in bad faith and retaliation against workers for union activity. In December, the opera filed its own claim against AGMA accusing the union of making threatening and belittling statements, engaging in bad faith negotiations and issuing “false, defamatory and disparaging allegations against Central City Opera.”

By early May, the opera and union had still not reached an agreement. Frustrated workers held a strike authorization vote. And, according to multiple sources familiar with the outcome, more than 90% of incoming workers and workers from the most recent year voted “yes,” saying they were ready to go on strike if necessary.

Hanlon believes that helped move the needle on negotiations.

“It was following that strike authorization that they agreed to bring in mediators, and there was a huge change in the tone of the negotiations at that point,” he said.

An agreement reached, but not everything resolved

AGMA and Central City Opera reached a collective bargaining agreement May 18, and the 2023 summer festival opened June 24 with “Romeo & Juliet.”

Then, in July, the union put out a statement accusing the opera of violating the new CBA by subcontracting dancers. 

Henry Maximilian McCall danced in the summer’s run of “Kiss Me Kate.” He said he was hired through a Denver dance company brought in by Central City Opera as a third-party subcontractor. 

“I am used to nonunion work, so the pay wasn’t surprising to me,” McCall told The Colorado Sun. “I’m no longer dancing for my primary income. So this was a space that I was happy to do some work and get to perform again.”

But once rehearsals began, things started to feel off. For one, McCall said they were rehearsing evenings from 7-10 p.m. Being on a nonunion contract, Central City Opera didn’t provide housing for the dancers, leaving McCall and others with a dark, and often stormy, hourlong commute back to Denver each night after rehearsal. He said he also learned he was making less than one-quarter of what he would have made had he been on an AGMA contract. Every dancer hired at Central City Opera is supposed to be, and has historically been, on an AGMA contract. The new collective bargaining agreement upheld the clause prohibiting subcontracted work included in the bargaining unit, like soloists, chorus members, stage managers and directors, and dancers — the exact kind of work that led McCall to the opera.”

During the week the production transitioned to working in the theater, ahead of the show’s opening, McCall said the dancers noticed that their pay was late.

“Several days late, and we were not given clear instructions on when that was going to be resolved,” he said, adding that he had recently become aware of the allegations of wage theft and delayed pay. “We did not feel comfortable waiting and hoping, and for our first dress rehearsal in the theater, none of the dancers were in attendance.”

The dancers informed management via email they wanted to be at the June 27 dress rehearsal and were excited to be a part of the production, but could not come until they were paid. They gave leadership a deadline of 4 p.m. At about 5 p.m., they got a response. But it was too late for the artists to make it to Central City in time for the rehearsal. The dancers did do the full run of shows, and McCall said it was an artistically rewarding experience to work with the other artists, but called it an “eye-opener.”

Several weeks later, in the midst of its summer festival, Central City Opera abruptly parted ways with its president and CEO of less than 18 months. 

The opera’s vice president of development, Scott Finlay, confirmed Pamela Pantos was no longer employed in an email and said the company would “begin a search immediately for a new president and CEO.” The Colorado Sun attempted to contact Pantos for an interview, but received no response.

In a statement following the news, AGMA said it hoped “this change in leadership signals a shift in CCO’s culture, a commitment to treating CCO artists with dignity, respect, and care, and an improvement to our working relationship with CCO.” 

As the opera looks for new leadership, an AGMA representative said the union will  continue to pursue resolution on several outstanding contract grievances, as well as multiple unfair labor practice claims. The opera’s claim against AGMA with the National Labor Relations Board remains open as well, according to the NLRB website. 

Central City Opera interim chief administrative officer Margaret Williams declined interview requests from The Colorado Sun.

“At this time, as we advance the search for a general director and focus on planning for the future, CCO is not taking media interviews, though of course will continue to issue periodic statements as warranted, as well as releases related to ongoing programming,” Williams wrote in an email.

The bigger labor picture: Are live performance workers having a moment? 

Since about 2017, AGMA has seen a notable uptick in successful unionization efforts, including Sacramento Ballet, Oregon Ballet Theatre, Nevada Ballet Theatre, principal singers with Music at Westwood of the Westwood Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, Ballet Idaho, stage managers for Des Moines Metro Opera, St. Louis Ballet, Ballet Memphis and Texas Ballet Theater.

Griff Braun is AGMA’s national organizing director and danced professionally. He said in the performing arts, particularly the classical forms, artists can have little agency and often, it’s ingrained in them from a young age when they’re training rigorously, to do what’s asked of them.

“There’s an inhibition and fear of ever rocking the boat, because there’s a certain group of people, or a perception at least, that holds your career in their hands,” Braun said. “And to ever contradict or to just even assert what you need to perform can be frightening.”

But he thinks, in recent years, some of that inhibition has faded or arts workers are feeling more emboldened to ask for workplace protections. Braun said many factor are influencing this,, including younger generations having an “awakening of sorts to collective power.”

“I think the pandemic had something to do with it as well, just pressing pause on the industry, as well as the #MeToo movement, and [the police killing of] George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. Everybody sort of stepped back and went, ‘Wait a minute, a lot of this sucks,’” he said.

Braun has seen AGMA members in the past five years push for more robust contract language on diversity, equity and inclusion and sexual harassment policies. 

“I think everybody’s feeding off of each other too,” said Stefanie Frey, director of organizing and mobilization for Actors’ Equity Association, the labor union representing 51,000-plus live performance stage managers and actors. Some Colorado-based Actors’ Equity members attended a solidarity rally for SAG-AFTRA at Denver’s City Park last week.

Frey said watching companies win their AGMA votes or seeing members of SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America strike over better wages and the use of artificial intelligence, as well as witnessing more visibility around labor movements within other industries outside the arts, is “putting wind in our sails.”

“We were all following the Amazon campaign. We were all following the UPS negotiation. It’s in the world of social media, and news alerts on our phone,” Frey said. “And because we all see these organizing victories, within performing arts spaces we’re getting leads. People are reaching out to us and saying, ‘Can we do it?’”

Some live performers who have learned they can, in fact, do this include dancers at the Star Garden Topless Dive Bar in Los Angeles, who unanimously voted to join Actors’ Equity in May, and the planetarium lecturers at Griffith Observatory, also in Los Angeles, who also won their election to unionize earlier this year.

The American Federation of Musicians, which represents about 80,000 professional instrumentalists in the U.S. and Canada, is experiencing some new organizing in the symphonic sector, but not much in general, according to Rochelle Skolnick, director of the Symphonic Services Division and special counsel and assistant to the president at AFM. Rather, what’s got Skolnick’s attention is an increased interest from musicians in the collective bargaining process.

“We get better results when the bargaining unit is organized and prepared to take a stand in support of their bargaining position, even if it never comes to a strike,” she said. “Just having that kind of unity and solidarity telegraphs a kind of power to the employer.”

Skolnick, who also worked as a professional violinist, thinks employers sometimes take advantage of that passion. 

“The other piece of the reality is that we are workers. We are workers who need to earn a living wage, and we need to have job security, and we need to have health insurance so that we can raise our families and be contributing members of our communities,” she said.

‘A complicated moment in American labor history’

Ahmed White, the Nicholas Rosenbaum professor of law at University of Colorado, said the share of union workers in the U.S. labor force has been on a steady decline since the 1970s, currently standing at 11.3% for both private and public sector workers. 

But according to a data analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, 2022 saw an increase in workers represented by unions and, between October 2021 and September 2022, the NLRB had a 53% increase in petitions for union elections. Additionally, a study from Cornell University reported that strikes were up by 52% last year, and a Gallup poll showed that Americans’ approval of unions is the highest it’s been in 1965.

“Unions have still not reversed the loss of numbers and returned to the levels of the 1970s, let alone the ‘30s or ‘40s with strikes. But they’ve got an energy and activism behind them, and they’ve got people listening to them in a way that wasn’t the case just a few years ago,” White, whose expertise includes U.S. labor law and collective bargaining, said.

White is not surprised to see pushback from companies and employers hiring law firms with a reputation for “union avoidance.”

“As long as there have been unions, there has been a culture in management, an art even, of opposing unions,” White said. 

For dancer McCall, deciding not to show up to a big Central City Opera rehearsal due to a missing payment was empowering. 

“It is in everyone’s best interest to be able to treat each other with respect and give people the credit that is deserved,” he said. “If that is through unions, then it’s through unions. If you can do without unions, that’s great. I just have not seen it consistently happening without.”

When the euphoric feeling of live performance is no longer enough

As for Opera Colorado and its union-hopeful workers, they’re awaiting a decision from the NLRB as to whether there will be an election.

Denver singer Zabatta said his interest in unionizing comes from a place of love for the company. 

“I believe in the mission of what they’re wanting to do in the state, in this community,” he said. “I feel like this is a way for them to be the best version of the company that they can be.”

Da Ros, the assistant stage director  of Opera Colorado’s “Turandot” and “The Shining” last season, said he’s tired of going through tough experiences to “just have the performance be the payoff.”

“We create this art and we deliver it to the audience, and you can go through a very unpleasant rehearsal period, but then the energy and the catharsis as you put it all out there for the audience, a lot of times that sort of wipes the slate clean, and we kind of forget,” he said. “I would rather not continue to work in the industry than to work under unfair conditions.”

Editor’s Note: Stephanie Wolf, who reported this story, was a member of AGMA while dancing professionally for the 2011-12 Metropolitan Opera season.

Melanie Murray hustles. When the 17-year-old from Hoboken, New Jersey, couldn’t get a ticket to the Taylor Swift concert in East Rutherford, she decided to perform Swift songs for people standing in the pop singer’s notoriously long merch lines.

“It kind of started as a joke,” she said.

Murray was slated to attend UCLA’s songwriting intensive this summer, but her afternoon in East Rutherford changed her mind. After experiencing a crowd full of supportive diehard fans of Taylor Swift — Swifties — outside of MetLife Stadium, she ditched the UCLA plan and built a schedule to follow Swift’s Eras tour, which landed in Denver on Friday. 

Pop stars have stans and rock stars have groupies, but Swifties are a different breed. More empowered, and more enterprising. It’s unsurprising, since Swift herself has a reputation as a savvy businesswoman who reportedly brings in more than $13 million per show, and whose tour as a whole is being compared to the GDPs of countries. Her two nights in Denver alone are estimated to contribute $140 million to Colorado’s GDP this year.

Of course, it’s not all about the money. It’s also about the community, the empowerment and the genuine connection her fans feel to the music. But it’s also about the money.

The positive shock

“We can easily see that we need positive shocks to the economy,” said Kishore Kulkarni, Distinguished Professor of Economics at Metropolitan State University. Positive shocks are events like the NBA Finals, or the Super Bowl, or the Democratic Party Convention, he said. “The Taylor Swift shock is just bigger.”

Swift has been selling out stadiums since her first tour in 2009, the Fearless tour, during which both her Staples Center show in Los Angeles and Madison Square Garden show in New York set records for the fastest ticket grabs in either arena’s history (one and two minutes, respectively). 

Swift has since graduated from the basketball arenas, which host around 20,000 people at capacity, to football stadiums, which hold around 80,000 people. Her shows still sell out within minutes.  

Her previous tour, the Reputation tour in 2018 that centered around her album of the same name, was the highest-grossing U.S. tour in decades. Her follow-up tour was canceled in 2020 due to COVID, but she continued to churn out her signature chart-toppers. 

The Eras tour launched in March from Glendale, Arizona, and sold more tickets at the Super Bowl Stadium than the Super Bowl did one month prior. On its third stop, at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, the tour broke the single-event attendance record at the arena where the Dallas Cowboys play. In Nashville, she set the single-event attendance record during her first show there on a Friday night, then proceeded to break her record twice over on Saturday and Sunday. Then she did it again in New Jersey, and again in Pennsylvania. 

The costs of these huge events are hard to quantify, since they are mostly qualitative, Kulkarni said. Denver residents might not go out for dinner on the weekend because the restaurants are overcrowded, but those seats will be filled by Taylor Swift fans. 

The most tangible downsides from the event will be traffic, pollution and “more beer drinkers on the street that day,” Kulkarni said. He added that the cost of ride-sharing and hotel rooms is expected to increase, though the latter shouldn’t affect local residents. “Overwhelmingly this is a good thing for Denver,” Kulkarni said. “And what’s good for Denver is good for Colorado.”

Tell me about the tickets

Ticket prices fluctuated as the Denver show dates neared, reaching highs upwards of $10,000 on the Monday before the show. 

Economists conservatively estimated that the two Denver nights generated $38 million in ticket revenues, based on Empower Field’s concert capacity and average ticket prices of $250. But the data doesn’t include the costs incurred by businesses due to Swifties calling out of work in order to painstakingly watch a Ticketmaster presale queue last November. 

Bella Vogt, a makeup artist and Sephora employee, told her work she had “a family thing,” and spent eight hours refreshing her screen. She later confessed the reason for her absence. Nathan Yan, a software engineer and aspiring DJ with a long Taylor Swift catalog in the back of his van, posted on a company Slack channel that the conference room was reserved for any Swifties trying to score tickets. A group sat around all day, half-working, half-watching the queue. 

Those who persevered through the presale managed to buy 2 million tickets for the 52-night, 20 city Eras tour, the most Ticketmaster has ever sold in a single day. Along with approximately 12 million other fans who left disappointed that day, the surge of buyers overwhelmed Ticketmaster’s system, and eventually led to legal action and multiple levels of legislation. 

Vogt’s sick-day strategy didn’t pay off, and she wasn’t able to land tickets on that first attempt. She was, however, among a group who received “second chance” tickets from Ticketmaster weeks after the initial meltdown. 

During this process, Ticketmaster emailed verified fan accounts and asked them to provide a price range they’d be willing to pay. When Vogt received the email that her tickets were confirmed, she couldn’t believe it. She thought it was a scam. She still thinks it’s “surreal.” Two tickets for $600 each. Floor seats in section M, row 1, seats 1 and 2. On Thursday she said she hoped to touch Swift’s hand when she rushed toward the crowd during “August.”

The growing economy

Concertgoers spend an average of $1,327 on related purchases according to a report by the Common Sense Institute, contributing more than $200 million in direct consumer spending during the Denver concerts. Shelby Morse, spokesperson for Denver’s office of Economic Development & Opportunity, said the industries that benefit most from major stadium tour stops are hospitality, rideshare/pedicabs, parking lots and retail. 

On Saturday afternoon, the makeup store Sephora at the 16th Street Mall was so busy that there were no representatives to speak with the Sun. “We’re so swamped, it’s bigger than our Black Friday sale,” one employee said over the phone before hurriedly hanging up. The makeup appointments were full well in advance — $60 for a full face, $90 for special designs — and the body glitter sold out Saturday morning.

Handmade outfits and make-up that reference Swift’s songs and music videos are a major part of preparing for the show. “We’re in the weeds. Like you won’t get half of the costumes that you see because they are so obscure,” said René Hurtado of Tempe, Arizona. “To be a Swiftie is to live as a Swiftie, you don’t just like casually know things.”

Hurtado’s outfit included a heavy denim jacket with a hand-painted list of Swift’s 10 albums down the back. It’s known as “Dave’s Eras Jacket,” and travels with the tour, from Swiftie to Swiftie, through the informal process of sending the wearer a DM on Instagram. She sent the Friday night wearer a DM offering to wait outside of Empower Field after the concert, and plans to go through her DMs tonight during a “focused, two-hour session” to decide who to send it to in Seattle, Swift’s next stop on the tour.

Siblings Sandra and Carlos Damas flew into Denver on Thursday from Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Mexico. Carlos said their preparation for the tour began in November, when they scored their tickets, but that things really started ramping up in March. There were the plane tickets, the hotels, the outfits, the friendship bracelets. When we spoke on Saturday afternoon, his sister Sandra was shopping at Sephora for the right shade of red lipstick for that night’s concert. She bought body glitter on Amazon ahead of time.

Vogt, the make-up artist whose concert countdown started “six to eight months ago,” is using the demand for her skills to contribute to the Swiftie community. On Saturday she and her girlfriend met out-of-town Swifties in their hotel room to do their make-up for the Night 2 show. They charged $75 per person. “So that’s basically paying for our merch,” Vogt said from the merch line outside Empower Field on Thursday, where she had been waiting since 4:30 a.m.

Murray, the merch-line singer, is serious about doing things on her own — with the help of her parents, of course. She said that touring the country this summer has given her more self-confidence and independence, and also a small following. It’s taught her how to put herself out there, how to hustle and how to stay determined.

But she’s also still in high school. Her flight to Swift’s Minneapolis show was her first time flying alone. She says things like “moooom,” like a typical embarrassed teenager, when she’s talking about how her mom will approach anyone to “market” her. She’s kidding, though, and is quick to point out that she wouldn’t be where she is today — in Denver — without the support of her parents. 

Murray FaceTimes her friends constantly. She keeps a book with all of her song lyrics, and a scrapbook with trinkets from the tour. Her favorite piece that she’s collected so far is a bracelet that a Taylor fan made after seeing her perform at a merch line in Detroit. The bracelet has one of Murray’s original song titles on it. 

Some of the most fulfilling conversations Murray has, though, are with the really young girls, because she sees so much of herself in them. Taylor Swift was Murray’s first concert. She went to Swift’s 1989 tour show at MetLife Stadium when she was 9. She’ll remember that concert for the rest of her life, she said, and she still has the T-shirt from the show. It was way too big for a 9 year old. 

The afterglow

During the lead up to Swift’s concerts the word that everyone seemed to use was “surreal.” Fans had been waiting for this show for months. But what happens when the lights go down and Swift jets off to Seattle, then Santa Clara, California, and then LA? 

“I’ve heard it called PTSD: Post Taylor Swift Depression,” said Yan, the software engineer. 

Some fans, like Vogt, are heading to Seattle right alongside her. Murray isn’t sticking around for the afterglow, either. She flew to Seattle on Saturday, her eighth and final stop before heading home to New Jersey for the rest of the summer. The tour within the tour has been better than a summer internship, Murray said. 

“A big thing I’ve learned is just how to have a lot of self-confidence, and not really care what other people think or say. You put yourself out there and if people hate it, people hate it. If people like it, that’s a great thing,” she said. “As a performer, it’s really impacted the way I talk to my audience.” 

She’s sure she’ll remember this summer for the rest of her life, and the T-shirt she bought at her first concert finally fits.

This story first appeared in The Outsider, the premium outdoor newsletter by Jason Blevins.

In it, he covers the industry from the inside out, plus the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

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Live Nation is not bringing its Seven Peaks festival back to the San Luis Valley, marking yet another move for the three-day country music concert. 

The world’s largest concert promoter got cross with Chaffee County commissioners over plans for the 2022 Seven Peaks festival at The Meadows in Buena Vista so the promoter moved the event to the San Luis Valley. 

The Labor Day Weekend festival drew about 12,000 concertgoers for three nights of camping and music on a private parcel outside tiny Villa Grove. By all local accounts, the gathering went smoothly.  

“Very well, really. I personally think it went better than I expected,” Saguache County Sheriff Dan Warwick said. 

So Saguache County officials were surprised when Live Nation told them last month that the event would not be returning to the San Luis Valley. 

“For no expressed reason,” Saguache County Commissioner Tom McCracken said. 

Live Nation promised officials the event would not burden local law enforcement. The promoter worked with the Colorado Department of Transportation and the Colorado State Patrol along with local businesses and law enforcement to make sure the event did not overwhelm the rural valley. 

“Live Nation did everything I asked. There was never any issues with them at all,” Warwick said. “I don’t think there was a negative impact, that I could see, to any local businesses or resources. Everything went very well.”

Calls and emails to Live Nation representatives were not returned. It is unclear if the festival will happen this year in another location. 

Last go-round, ticket sales for the Sept. 2-4 event began in the spring, before Live Nation had secured all the required permits from Chaffee County. The county’s commissioners and health officials wanted to limit attendance as a pandemic-related precaution and that was an issue. Live Nation officials told Chaffee County commissioners it needed to begin marketing the 2022 concert in the spring to make sure it could sell enough tickets.  

Eventually the company left Buena Vista for Villa Grove. 

“I think it’s horrible they are not coming back,” Warwick said. “I really enjoyed it and I think it was good for the valley as a whole to bring something like that. It was something we don’t see in the valley very often.”

None of event’s social media channels have mentioned a 2023 concert or lineup and comments on the festival’s latest posts from February are heavy with concerns about dates, ticket sales and the potential of the event not happening. 

Seven Peaks Festival founder Dierks Bentley in early May told the “Taste of Country” podcast that the festival he started in 2019 in Buena Vista was a challenge in the San Luis Valley. 

“There was no electricity out there and not very good cell service and not many amenities. It was kind of a hard place to do it,” Bentley said in the May 3 podcast. “We didn’t make any money. We lost millions of dollars. And I think Live Nation was like ‘we need to find a way to make money.’”

Bentley said “there’s a possibility” of the event moving to Red Rocks this year. 

“After five years it might be nice to see how it works in a place near civilization,” he said. 

1stBank Center, the sports and entertainment venue visible from U.S. 36 in Broomfield, will go dark Nov. 30 and likely will be torn down by next spring. 

The 16-year-old, city-owned venue built to jump-start development near the busy Wadsworth Boulevard and U.S. 36 intersection is heavily in debt and never broke even for Broomfield, which on Tuesday decided to put the facility to rest.

“It’s time we ripped the Band-Aid off,” city manager Jennifer Hoffman told the Broomfield Urban Renewal Authority’s Board of Directors on Tuesday night before the panel voted to end its operating agreement with Peak Entertainment.

Peak Entertainment, a partnership of AEG Presents Rocky Mountains and Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, has managed the arena since 2009.

The 6,500-seat arena, marketed for concerts and semi-pro sports events, never found its place in metro Denver’s fluid entertainment market and it has been a persistent financial drain on Broomfield, siphoning millions from other urban renewal zones to cover repayment of bonds used to build it.

The unanimous vote to terminate the operating agreement, which begins the process of identifying a new use for the 11-acre 1stBank Center site, is not a surprise, city officials say.

The city studied turning the facility into a convention hall or even a new home for University of Colorado basketball teams. Those ideas never got traction, officials said Tuesday night.

Razing the structure could make way for something that could complement the burgeoning Arista development and benefit Broomfield, Hoffman said. The transit-oriented development has grown up to fill the southeastern corner of U.S. 36 and Wadsworth Parkway and includes a hospital, office and medical buildings, and more than 2,000 units of housing.

The city owns the 11-acre parcel adjacent to U.S. 36 where the arena stands. “This is a sweet spot for us,” Hoffman told the Broomfield City Council, which is also the BURA board. If approved, a full demolition of the center could be finished by next spring, she said.

“It will be sad to tear it down.”

The 1stBank Center opened in November 2006 as the Broomfield Event Center as a multi-purpose entertainment and sports arena, according to the city. Peak Entertainment took over operations and management in 2009, and the next year sold naming rights for the arena to FirstBank Holding Co.

The arena hosted a semi-pro hockey and basketball team as well as the Denver Roller Dolls roller derby squad. It also drew acts such as Dave Matthews Band, Carrie Underwood and The Lumineers. 

Council member Stan Jezierski said the center helped Broomfield stand out from other metro cities. “It’s one of the few things that made us unique in the metro area,” he said. “It will be sad to tear this down.”

Most Broomfield residents were not around during the center’s heyday, which was just after Peak took over, Hoffman said. 

The center costs $1.2 million to operate annually, excluding the cost of policing the facility. “The continued use of Broomfield public safety to support the Event Center creates a financial liability as well as a safety risk to Broomfield Police Officers and to Broomfield,” the staff memo states.

The annual debt service for the Event Center during the past five years of the operator agreement has ranged from $250,000 to approximately $1 million from BURA, according to the city. 

If the arena remains, it will need $5 million to $6 million in maintenance over the next two to five years, including a new roof and updated HVAC systems, the city says.

Councilmember Todd Cohen said the Event Center is too much of a financial burden to be maintained.

“We need to stop pouring money on the fire,” Cohen said.

Hoffman did not say when she plans to present a schedule for the planned demolition. She also had no estimate on the cost to take down the building. A consultant will be brought in to advise the city on its next steps.

The 1stBank Center, owned by the Broomfield Urban Renewal Authority, was constructed for $45 million and financed by issuing $59.8 million in bonds. 

The decision was made to bond for more than needed so the city would have a cushion to make the bond payments until the anticipated tax revenue was realized, Hoffman said.

The bond payments were supposed to be repaid from taxes generated from within the Wadsworth Interchange urban renewal area. But sluggish progress of the Arista development stunted the anticipated tax revenue until 2020, according to a city staff memo.

To support the original 2005 bond sale of $59.8 million, almost $36 million was taken from six other Broomfield Urban Renewal Areas between 2009 and 2019. “There is no plan to reimburse the other URAs, as essentially Broomfield would be paying back Broomfield,” the memo states.

Since 2020, the Wadsworth Interchange Urban Renewal Area has generated only enough revenue to cover the event center bond payment. Additional funds have been pulled from BURA to support the cost to operate the venue and its parking lots, the memo states.

About $34.2 million in principal remains unpaid on the event center bond. By the time BURA pays off the bond in 2029 it will have paid about $135 million, according to the city.

Concerts lately have demanded a lot of police presence

Meanwhile, the arena has never approached the estimated 180 to 190 annual events for which it was constructed, the city says.

Since Peak assumed operations, the busiest year for the event center was 2016 when 33 concerts were held. In 2017 there were 27 concerts, 2018 had 17 concerts, 2019 had 13 concerts. Bookings dropped to five concerts in 2020 and six in 2021, due to COVID restrictions.

So far this year, Peak has booked fewer than 10 concerts and events in the arena, with only three additional shows scheduled over the next six months. During this same period other regional venues — many operated by Peak — have captured audiences and opened new possibilities for Peak as those venues continue to have more shows and events, the city memo states.

“If you have ever been to Mission Ballroom or the refreshed Fillmore Auditorium, you will see what we are up against,” Cohen said. Mission Ballroom, which also is run by Peak Entertainment, is in RiNo and has capacity for 4,000 people. The Fillmore is the Live Nation-owned concert hall on East Colfax Avenue in Denver that has a capacity of 3,700 people.

The city points out the type of events booked into 1stBank Center has evolved to include an increasing number of electronic dance music, or EDM, wrestling and mixed martial arts events.

Broomfield police and emergency services have also had to deal with more calls at the event center, including 738 medical calls to the arena since 2016. The city says that 73% of all medical calls came specifically from EDM shows. An EDM show held in February resulted in 79 medical responses, eight indecent exposure citations, multiple drug-related arrests, and a number of neighborhood noise disturbance complaints.

The number of incidents at the event center that require a police response is “objectionable,” council member Jean Lim said.

In its prime, Frozen Dead Guy Days was a spectacle of hard-partying costume wearing and macabre events, and was the pride of Nederland, a mountain town west of Boulder with a population of 1,500. 

But those days are over for the cold-weather party that started the third weekend of March 2002 and grew up around a corpse wrapped in a sleeping bag and stored in a styrofoam-lined sarcophagus filled with dry ice in a Tuff Shed behind a half-constructed castle built to withstand fire, earthquake and other natural disasters. 

In December 2022, the wealthy hotelier John Cullen, who owns the Stanley Hotel, bought the three-day festival for $250,000. And starting Friday, the party, which has been featured in newspapers across the globe, on major television networks like CBS and NBC and on BBC Travel is being reborn in Estes Park.

If the above paragraphs have your head spinning, you’re not alone. Much in this story sounds too strange to be true, but it is, and it’s causing heartache as well as celebration as some in Nederland mourn the loss of their festival and others in Estes Park prepare for a Frozen Dead Guys Day rebirth. The Lazarus moment starts tomorrow with a ribbon-cutting ceremony by Mayor Wendy Koenig. 

But in order to understand what’s at stake, you need to know the strange story of how Frozen Dead Guy Days began, the even stranger one of where its going and how the guy at the center of it all — Grandpa Bredo Morstoel, the body lying in repose in the Tuff Shed overlooking Nederland — may get a better home to await his rebirth at the Stanley, making Cullen even richer and pouring money into child care and workforce housing for Estes Park. 

How a dead guy ended up in Tuff Shed at 8,200 feet 

The story starts not with Morstoel but with his grandson, Trygve Bauge, who, as a youngster, became fascinated by the science of preserving tissue at ultracold temperatures for future human reanimation. 

According to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, one of several cryogenics facilities in America, cryonics is the “practice of preserving life by pausing the dying process, using subfreezing temperatures with the intent of restoring good health with medical technology in the future.” 

A name you might recognize who’s been cryogenically frozen: the baseball player Ted Williams, who, according to a 2002 Sports Illustrated story, was decapitated by surgeons at the cryonics company where his body is suspended in liquid nitrogen. Some 500 others, including Bauge’s mother, Aud, reportedly lie in repose at places like Alcor, founded in 1972 in Scottsdale, Arizona, or Cryonics Institute in Detroit, Michigan.

But neither of these places were built when Bauge, looking out over the Norwegian Sea with his Grandpa Bredo as a young man, spoke passionately about the idea of self-preservation.

“My grandpa knew that I wanted to be suspended and he was probably aware that I wanted to freeze family members,” Bauge told The Sun over WhatsApp from Oslo. “He was not opposed to it. He liked to be alive, and he had visited both Nederland and Estes Park after I moved to Colorado in 1980.” 

When Morstoel died in 1989, Bauge coordinated to have him frozen in Norway. Then he had Bredo’s body transported to a cryonics center called Trans Time Inc. in San Leandro, California. There, if experts followed traditional cryopreservation methods, the water would have been removed from Morstoel’s cells and replaced with a glycerol-based chemical mixture called “cryoprotectant” — a kind of human antifreeze. The process, called “vitrification,” according to the National Institute of Health, puts the cells into a state of suspended animation. In contrast, Morstoel’s body was “straight frozen,” Bauge said. Bauge paid for the process with inheritance money. There Morstoel stayed until 1993.

Meanwhile, Bauge bought a piece of property overlooking the town of Nederland, where he planned to build a cryogenics facility. The remnants of that place still stand — a half-castle made of dark gray concrete and fortified by rebar, “no wood allowed,” Bauge said.  

On one side he began building a two-story tower in which he planned to put a metal cylinder he would fill with liquid nitrogen to store one or two more people once the facility was finished. 

Before construction was completed, Bauge had Morstoel collected from Trans Time and brought to Nederland. With his facility unfinished, he placed Morstoel’s container in a shed behind the castle. Ever since, Morstoel’s body, inside his “sarcophagus,” has been packed in dry ice, delivered by a rotating cast of characters. 

Teresa Warren, a Nederland resident and creator of a television-series concept called “Frozen Dead,” met Bauge when he moved to Nederland. She said he “isn’t really keeping grandpa to bring him back to life … because all of the facilities that keep bodies for re-animation freeze them in liquid nitrogen which is minus 200 degrees Celsius. But on dry ice, they’re only minus 90 degrees Celsius.” 

Bauge said bringing Morstoel back to life isn’t the point. “My grandfather and mother, who also lies in cryogenic repose, were dead before they were frozen. But there are still lots of options for extending their lives.”

He cites aspirational work by American researchers hoping to use a gene-editing tool to splice frozen woolly mammoth DNA into that of an Asian elephant and resurrect a long extinct species, though in hybrid form.

“Rome wasn’t built in one day, so what I can see with my grandfather — at some point we will be able to create a younger version of him,” Bauge said. 

A very abbreviated history of Nederland’s Frozen Dead Guy Days 

In 2002 — years after Bauge was deported back to Norway on an expired visa, after the town of Nederland discovered the castle hadn’t been built to code and authorities evicted Aud, and after Aud’s fears that eviction would lead to the melting of Bredo’s body were relayed to the public, and after the town created a “grandfather clause” that would let Morstoel and the Tuff Shed stay — Warren had an epiphany that would change everything. 

Warren was president of the now-defunct Nederland Chamber of Commerce when she realized, in 2002, that the town needed a festival to help businesses get through the lull between when Eldora ski area closed and the summer tourist season picked up. 

The lineup for the first festival was as goofy as it was inspired. It included coffin races, where seven-person teams raced a “corpse” down the street in homemade boxes, a hearse parade, a frozen salmon toss and a costumed dance called “Grandpa’s Blue Ball.” Through minimal advertising and word-of-mouth, 1,700 people showed up, Warren said. It was a one-day festival and the wind blew 70 miles per hour, Warren recalled. 

It grew and “maybe the second year it was 5,000 people,” Warren said. “Then we were doing ice sculptures in the roundabout in Nederland, and New Belgium brewed us a special beer. More people wanted to volunteer — we added all of these things to do. When the chamber had it we had volunteers. And it continued in that spirit — growing every year with little money and force of volunteerism,” until Amanda MacDonald, an entrepreneur from Gilpin County, bought it from the chamber for $6,000 in 2012.  

By then, MacDonald had been running the festival for the chamber for several years. Attendee numbers were high — 10- to 15,000 people. Several of the festival events were in place, and it now spanned three days. The chamber had stationed a tent for bands in the town park in a previous year, and MacDonald continued the tradition of hosting musicians. For several years, the festival ran relatively smoothly, despite monumental challenges, MacDonald said, like 90-mile-per-hour winds during her first year of ownership, day-of snowstorms and water main breaks. 

But like many things that turn from quaint and great to unwieldy and challenged, Frozen Dead Guy Days became problematic as it grew from 5,000 attendees to 20,000 attendees in the tiny town with narrow streets. As it grew, town officials began to feel they were unable to effectively manage crowds that large. 

“I think it was when we started attracting 30,000 to 35,000 people and you couldn’t even get into a music tent. That’s when Amanda should have started charging money to get into the festival,” Warren said. “But she only wanted to charge for entrance into the music tents.” 

It’s hard to manage a crowd that size without putting up some kind of barrier, Warren added. “If we had charged more money we would have made as much and made it more exclusive.”

 Fewer people would have also made it easier for law enforcement and emergency services to protect the town and the visitors, Town Administrator Miranda Fisher said. And to make matters worse, the festival failed to follow the town’s stipulations, Fisher said.  

“It outgrew us, a town of 1,500 trying to support 20,000,” Fisher added. “In the end, the town couldn’t treat the festival like it did in 2002. With thousands of people, we were left with damages and we knew we wouldn’t have the financial means to recover if we kept going.”

One point of contention Fisher mentions is a Great Outdoors Colorado grant the town had secured for improvements on Guercio Field, next to the teen center. The town had worked to define a trail system there, and following the festival, “it turned into a giant mud pool and we had to start over,” Fisher said. Event organizers insisted they needed to have the event on the field. The town was willing to make that agreement hoping the infrastructure problems wouldn’t happen again. 

But in the end, Fisher said the organizers didn’t meet the expectations the town set for them. And MacDonald said she wishes things could have worked out differently. “I think there were different perspectives,” she said, but in the big picture she thinks the festival under her leadership was a “financial boon for the town.”  Nonetheless, in March of 2022, the town shut Frozen Dead Guy Days down, after it had survived a two-year pause due to COVID-19. 

A “visionary” snaps up FDGD 

Nine months later, Cullen, the Stanley Hotel owner, bought the festival for $250,000. He then handed all operations to Visit Estes Park, retaining only the Blue Ball, which will be held Friday evening in the Stanley Hotel concert hall. 

In the Wine Room at the Stanley on Tuesday, Cullen told The Sun he bought the festival to help round out Estes Park’s economy in the nonsummer months. He likened its potential for growth to the Burning Man festival, which started in San Francisco with 8,000 people and saw 80,000 people last year. He said he doesn’t want Frozen Dead Guy Days to get that big.  

“There’ve been a couple of other groups who have said we should buy it and move it to the flatlands,” he added. “But Estes Park and Nederland share a lot of the same culture and spirit and they’re only 40 miles apart.” 

One major difference between the towns, however, is that while Nederland has 1,500 residents and serves a reported summer tourist population of 150,000, Estes has 8,500 residents serving 8 million year-round tourists.  

Estes Park has infrastructure demands, housing demands and education demands for those full-time residents who serve the 8 million people, Cullen said. That’s why when he bought the festival he gave it to the town with the stipulation that all of the proceeds and profits go to child care and workforce housing.

When they took the festival over, Visit Estes Park enlisted 14 businesses to join in the party. 

Events planned for this weekend include live music, a “brain freeze ice cream eating contest,” a “frostbite fashion show,” a frozen T-shirt contest, a pub crawl and the Stanley’s Blue Ball. Some, like the coffin races, are holdovers from Nederland, while others, like “skull bowling” are purely Estes. And the feeling from some of those participating could be described as excited while a bit critical of Ned’s version of the event, laced with hopeful optimism that Estes can create a new, lasting festival.  

Cullen reiterated that he’s getting “nothing” out of the festival. Then he added, “I get the glory of actually having one more event in this town that actually makes it fun and weird. And I will help keep it weird by having the central ball, the Blue Ball, be fun and weird. That is right up our alley at Stanley Hotel,” which has other, larger plans for Grandpa Bredo’s body, which he would explain later.

LEFT: Nick Smith of Lumpy Ridge Brewing shows a six-pack of Frozen Dead Guy Days beer, a 5% ABV pale ale, in Estes Park. Right: A “Frozen Dead Guy” pie, made by Estes Park Pie Shop & Diner (You Need Pie!), is a new cream cheese-based pie flavor that features edible gummy fingers. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

The New Estes Park FDGD

Out in Estes Park, on a tour of three businesses participating in the event, it appeared things aren’t going to be as weird as Cullen’s Blue Ball. On the first stop, at a restaurant-bakery called You Need Pie! owner Val Thompson took a break from a lunch hour packed with a clientele including spring breakers from Texas, locals with a sweet tooth and elderly members of the Estes-based folk-gospel singing group, Mountain Music Makers. 

Sitting on a bench outside with a view of the Rockies, Thompson told The Sun, “I’ve actually never been to Dead Guy Days, so when it was going to come here I was like this could be interesting.” Thompson said she hadn’t had any ideas for the new festival when Visit Estes Park reached out to her to participate. “But we talked about resurrecting the things that they did in Nederland, only maybe in a little bit more … what’s the word … professionalized way.” 

When asked to explain “professionalized,” she said, the way Visit Estes Park’s Kara Franker explained it, “it was instead of giving people chainsaws and saying, ‘here carve a block of ice,’ they might hire an ice carver. That kind of concept. But I think here, because Estes Park is so experienced at festivals … it may go a little more smoothly.” 

Meanwhile Nick Smith, the founder of Lumpy Ridge Brewing, said the brewery was involved in Nederland’s festival for several years and made a branded canned beer for it last year. He said Estes’ festival will never be like Nederland’s, but that the town will do it justice in its own way. 

He was also optimistic when he saw Visit Estes Park’s initial five-minute presentation. He thought “they get it. They didn’t lean into Halloween. They leaned into the freak-fest spectacle, human tricks and a reason to get outside and party in winter.” 

Over at Cousin Pat’s Pub & Grill, the general manager was prepping for an faux Irish wake, which the bar is planning to host because St. Patrick’s Day and Frozen Dead Guy Days fall on the same weekend. 

Smith said that even though he knows there are some hard feelings in Nederland about Estes Park’s takeover of the festival, he thinks people in both places get the overall intention. 

And Koenig, the “ceremonial mayor of Estes Park, said she believes any money Cullen brings to the town will be a good thing.

The real relocation winner may be Grandpa Bredo

On Tuesday afternoon, as the dinner crowd was ramping up at The Stanley, Cullen received an email from Estes Park officials. 

It said, in short, that Cullen and Bauge could move forward with a plan they’d been concocting. Over the weekend, Cullen had flown to Oslo to meet Bauge in person. The two discussed moving Grandpa Bredo Morstoel to the ice house on The Stanley Hotel’s premises. Cullen said that while the town’s approval was big, two bigger approvals still were outstanding: Bauge’s, which rested on factors Cullen wouldn’t discuss, and Alcor Life Extension Foundation’s, because if the move happened Cullen said they’d facilitate it, not him. 

He added that the final decision should be made within the next month or two. If Morstoel’s body is moved, Cullen is planning to turn the ice house into a cryogenics museum. 

Visit Estes Park said it’s expecting approximately 4,000 people all told to come to the newly professionalized Frozen Dead Guy Days festival this weekend. 

It remains to be seen how professional people will think a cryogenics museum, complete with a cryogenically frozen dead guy, will be. 

CORRECTION: This story was updated at 10:25 a.m. on March 16, 2023, to correct the spelling of Amanda MacDonald’s name. At 3:05 p.m. on March 17, 2023, the some details of Trygve Bauge’s story were corrected, including that he orchestrated moving his grandfather to Boulder from Oslo by phone, his grandpa was “straight frozen,” not vitrified, and the freezing process was paid for by Bauge. Also, his mother is in repose in The Cryonics Institute, and there are reportedly 500 cryogenically frozen people in the U.S.

After George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery were killed in 2020, the national reckoning that followed sparked many needed conversations about racism in America. But as those conversations became more widespread, the polarization among Black and white Americans became more prevalent, too.

Now leaders of The Black Legacy Project are working to reduce that polarization through guided conversations and songs. Their project, which lands in Denver next week, seeks to celebrate Black history through music to advance racial equity, solidarity and belonging.

The idea for the new program emerged when Todd Mack, who has led a nonprofit that uses music to connect people for almost two decades in Atlanta, was looking for a new way to unite Black and white Americans during a time of widespread division in 2020.

“We don’t talk enough about Black history in this country. We also don’t talk enough about white folks who have worked in collaboration with Black folks to help advance equality and change,” said Trey Carlisle, who co-created The Black Legacy Project with Mack. 

“We wanted the Black Legacy Project to be an opportunity for folks to revisit that history through song, see how it still rings true today, and then from that, be inspired to think about: ‘How can we continue to carry the torch and work in solidarity today to advance greater belonging?’”

In 2020, while Black Lives Matter protests spanned the country, Mack had been listening to songs written in the 1980s by Bob Dylan about the murder of Emmett Till and other injustices faced by Black people in the 1960s. He heard lyrics about racism in the 60s that still are true today. He was inspired by Dylan’s desire to stand in solidarity with Black people and call for racial equality in his songs.

Mack and Carlisle soon after created The Black Legacy Project, which seeks to close racial divisions and cultivate solidarity between Black and white Americans, through guided conversations and musical exploration. 

“We wanted the Black Legacy Project to be an opportunity for folks to revisit these songs, draw strength from them, and draw strength from the stories of Black and white folks in the past working together to call for change,” Carlisle said. 

The project will land in seven different communities throughout 2022 and 2023, uniting Black and white artists who will record present day interpretations of songs central to the Black American experience. Artists will then compose originals relevant to the pressing calls for change today. Community roundtable discussions will help inform how those songs are interpreted and rewritten. 

The Black Legacy Project launched in 2021 in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. The project moved to its second location to engage people in the Ozarks in Arkansas in May. The event will descend in Denver from Sept. 6-11 before it moves to Los Angeles in early December. Project leaders will work with participants in the Mississippi Delta in February, before traveling to Atlanta in April. The event concludes in June in its seventh community, Boise, Idaho.

The seven locations were chosen to create a snapshot of America’s diversity while highlighting the idea that Black history is American history, and Black history exists in every corner of the county, even in areas where it’s least expected. The tour includes big cities with racial diversity, small rural areas, communities that are predominantly white and municipalities that are predominantly Black, Mack said.

In each community the project travels to, project leaders have hand-picked songs that have a theme connected to the local community. The songs are examined by Black and white residents, who break off into affinity groups with others from their own racial demographic, to discuss the meaning of the song’s lyrics. The two groups come together to present what they’ve learned and then offer ideas for how they might move closer to achieving racial equality. Those songs are then reimagined and performed by Black and white artists from the area.

The selected theme for Denver participants is “walking in my shoes,” which focuses on the importance of envisioning one’s self in the place of others, to help build bridges across racial divides and curb interracial violence, Carlisle said. 

Denver participants will unpack lyrics from the songs, “The Klan,” and “The Ballad of the Walking Postman,” both recorded by Walt Conley, a Black man considered by many to be the founding father of the Denver folk music scene. Community members will analyze the lyrics of these songs in round table discussions to help inform how local artists will then musically reinterpret them. 

Registration is required for the free roundtable discussion in Denver on Tuesday, Sept. 6, at 7 p.m. The location will be announced when people register. The project will culminate with a free performance at Swallow Hill Music in South Denver on Sunday, Sept. 11, at 7 p.m. The event will include a screening of a docu-series that is being produced about The Black Legacy Project. Each episode depicts a location the project is traveling to and performances of the reinterpreted songs. 

Dzirae Gold, a musical co-director for the Denver-based portion of the project, was surprised when she was invited to help lead the project but decided to participate to help produce music with intentionality, she said.

“Our goal is to communicate the power of music and the ability to bridge worlds to highlight differences and similarities between our world today and the world almost a century ago,” she said. “Community involvement is encouraged and is actually crucial to the success of the project.”

The theme “walking in my shoes” was chosen for Denver because project leaders identified a powerful history of interracial solidarity and activism in the city to prevent racial violence, Carlisle said. 

Dr. Joseph Henry Peter Westbrook, a notable activist and philanthropist in Denver in the early 1900s, infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan to help prevent violence against Black people in the Mile High City. That was decades before the movie “BlacKkKlansman” depicted the life of Ron Stallworth, a Colorado Springs police detective, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1970s. 

Local activist Theo E.J. Wilson, an opinion columnist for the Colorado Sun, infiltrated the alt-right movement on social media in the 2000s and has since worked to create spaces where people of different racial backgrounds can have healing and meaningful conversations about shared humanity, Carlisle said.

Similarly, Dr. Clarence Holmes created the Cosmopolitan Club of Denver, which was organized in the early 1900s. The club brought Black, white, Japanese and Jewish Americans together to promote racial solidarity and social change while the Ku Klux Klan was prominent in Denver.

“There’s a big need for those stories to be told and discussed in settings where community members can hear each other and empathize with each other and see themselves in the other person’s shoes,” Carlisle said. “That is really the starting ground for where empathy can be cultivated, solidarity can be cultivated and this social change and activism can inspire.”

The Black Legacy Project is produced by Music in Common, an Atlanta-based nonprofit launched in 2005 by Mack, a singer-songwriter. Music In Common strengthens, empowers, and connects communities through music and was started by Mack after his friend and bandmate, Daniel Pearl, was abducted and murdered in Pakistan in 2002. Pearl was a Wall Street Journal reporter.

The Black Legacy Project centers on healing through music, an expressive and disarming tool that can unite people before they dive into challenging conversations about racism, Mack said. “Half the battle is getting people to the table.”

Attending the Black Legacy Project’s event in the Ozarks, however, was an easy decision for Tanya Evans, a multicultural outreach librarian working with communities of color in Springdale, Arkansas. 

She attended the roundtable discussion about race and learned Springdale had been a sundown town, an all-white neighborhood that excluded people of color by using discriminatory laws, harassment, threats and other violence. Although Black people were allowed to work or travel in a sundown community during the day, they were required to leave by sundown. Older Black participants at the roundtable discussion had lived in smaller towns surrounding Springdale when sundown signs were visible around the community as recently as the 1980s, Evans said. 

“I think it’s cathartic for people who’ve experienced racism in America, and for other people who do not belong to minority groups, and who are white people,” she said. “There are a lot of things that they don’t know and there were some ‘aha’ moments for a lot of people at that discussion.”

When Evans was growing up in southern Arkansas, her grandmother told her to always ask for a receipt and a shopping bag when she visited the store, to reduce the likelihood that she would ever be accused of shoplifting, she said.

“We need to examine the past, look at how far we’ve come and see how far we need to go,” she added. “I saw that it was a learning experience all across the board for all of us … Until you actually meet somebody that’s lived that and you hear the pain in their voice, or see it in their eyes, I don’t think you’ll ever really get it.”

After the dialogue, Evans told Black Legacy Project leaders that the younger people are exposed to conversations about racism in America, “the better off” and more tolerant future generations will become. 

“These types of conversations won’t solve the problem,” she said. “But I think they can help in the healing process. There are a lot of people in America that have scars, and they need to heal, and just ignoring it won’t make it go away,” she said as she began to cry. “I wish every school kid in America could experience this project.”

MORE: The Black Legacy Project is sponsored by The Colorado Sun and other organizations.