BOSS TALK
with Promoter Troy Timpel @troytimpel
Villain Arts 2020
T
his was going to be a great year in January. Minneapolis, Council Bluffs, Philly, Atlanta, and Cleveland all beat last year’s numbers. I was all set for Chicago when…… Seems like years ago, thinking back to March now. Its like we are living in a Sci fi movie. We did our best to try to reschedule and push the shows back to the point of the country returning to normal. We managed to get one show out. OKC. OKC is a great little city and a super nice show. The state had among the lowest Covid numbers in the
“Seems like years ago, thinking back to March now.” country when we decided to move forward with the show. We did a great job in managing the event. Temp checks, free masks to the public if they didn’t have them. Booths were spread apart. We gave additional space for artists, 6ft social distancing for the stage and contest areas. Mandatory masks for everyone. Large areas for the public, 40ft ceilings.Masks are not a requirement in Oklahoma. Not for Tattooing, not for retail, no mask requirements at all. We required them for safety. It resulted in us deleting 200 comments a day from our social media. We got slammed from both the hard left and hard right. “Can’t believe your being greedy and unsafe by running an event during a pandemic” and “you can’t infringe on my personal freedoms by making me wear a mask” were the most common deleted subjects. We were featured by multiple TV crews and reporters as we were one of the first to move forward with an event in July for OKC. They all said it was the most masks they had seen worn in OKC ever. It was a far
Villain Arts Tattoo News Magazine Fall 2020 Issue 1
safer environment than shopping at a “Box store” and one of the safest places we saw during our visit there. We still drew half the attendance as the year before. The artists killed it, as there were more than half the booths to split the public draw from. We canceled the years events after returning from OKC. There is no way to turn a profit on events during Covid. It will change quickly when the vaccines come out. Herd immunity for vaccine is only 50% of the country. At the time of this writing we are moving forward and hoping that Jan will allow us to move forward again safely. Trump made a press release today that the CDC is getting states prepped for release of the vaccine on Nov 1st. I doubt that will happen as none of the vaccines are scheduled to pass FDA phase 3 by then, continued on next page
