Sense of relief returns to live entertainment venues
On Friday morning, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn bent over to greet Curly, a Linnaeus two-toed sloth who had traveled from the Houston Zoo to the Heights Theater for a panel discussion of a grant program that helped both of those venues survive the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I don’t think he recognizes me,” said Cornyn, who was joined by Isabella Casillas Guzman, administrator of the Small Business Administration.
“He recognizes apples,” explained Lee Ehmke, president and CEO of the Houston Zoo.
Curly had, allegedly, napped through a previous meeting with the senator and his staff. But now he marched back and forth along a pole, upside-down, munching slices of fruit and bits of carrot.
Cornyn and Guzman were in Houston to talk about the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program, which was created by the Save Our Stages Act, authored by the Texas Republican and U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat.
The nearly $15 billion program was authorized as part of a $900 billion COVID-19 stimulus package in December 2020. Although its early months were bedeviled by a glitchy website, $1.16 billion has now been distributed to support 758 music venues, museums and other live entertainment venues in Texas.
“These were institutions that were completely shuttered — first to close, last to reopen,” said Guzman, adding that more than 80 percent of the grantees in Texas were “smallest of the small” businesses, having fewer than fifty full-time employees.
Edwin Cabaniss, owner of the Heights Theater and chair of the Music Avenue Alliance-Texas, explained that when the shutdowns began in March 2020, he felt confident that the theater could weather this crisis, perhaps with the Paycheck Protection Program. But he soon realized that his team was facing “a bitter fight for survival,” so he reached out to Cornyn’s office.
“I know the world really likes our oil — and now, our natural gas — but I think the greatest export in the state of Texas is its culture and its music,” said Cabaniss. “So we wanted to tell that story. But we knew we were going to have to meet with our good fiscally conservative friends on the Republican side.”
It helped, he added, that a winter 2019 study from the Tex
as Music Office found that music-related business and education directly account for more than $4 billion in earnings in the state each year, as well as supporting nearly 100,000 jobs.
The exas Legislature also passed a measure, in 2021, providing some support to the state’s small music venues.
The SBA is a relatively small federal agency, with an annual budget of just under $1 billion. It has never had occasion to administer a program like this one, or the Paycheck Protection Program.
But, Guzman said, the SBA was determined to help America’s small businesses “beat the data,” as she put it. A 2020 study from the Federal Emergency Management Agency found that 40 percent of businesses shuttered by a disaster never reopen, and another 25 percent fail within a year. For small businesses,
those with fewer than fifty employees, the statistics are even more bleak.
Retired Lt. Gen. Doug Owens, president and CEO of the Lone Star Flight Museum, said the museum, which opened in 1990, moved from Galveston to Houston’s Ellington Airport in September 2017, in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.
“We had our first normal kind of year in 2019,” said Owens.
Now, though, a sense of normalcy is returning to these Houston venues, and with it, a feeling of relief.
“Of course there are headwinds, but these are just normal business problems,” Cabaniss said. “They're not pandemic issues. They're not hurricane issues. It's just, you know, inflation and things of that nature. But we can deal with that.”
Cornyn mused that it was a day for celebration.
“I love it when government programs work,” he said.