Sayonara, Studio
Feb. 16th, 2022 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kimberlysteeleThe year was 1996. I was twenty-three years old, working a series of degrading and frustrating temp jobs as a recent musical college graduate. I had fought hard for my degree, so hard in fact that the thought of being involved in the music scene with all of its dramas felt a little revolting. The grass seemed greener on the non-bohemian, corporate side at the time. Temping held out the lure of the mythical Good Company, a place where people treated each other well and if that failed, there was always a high salary with benefits to compensate for any grievances. I quickly learned that almost all American companies are plagued by pyramid schemes. In almost every company I worked for as a temp, there were a few men at the top. This elite CEO set lived in McMansions, flew to far off locales on international vacations, and generally did next to nothing.
Over the years, the Studio weathered many storms. Commercial neighbors came and went. The building was sold to a new landlord who wasn't as good as the old landlord, but was competent enough for a time.
Despite being surrounded by competitors, five within a one mile radius, to be exact, the Kimberly Steele Studio was a unique draw and I managed to keep a thriving business practice. The Studio had a certain relaxed vibe. In 2014, we recorded for the Coca-Cola Superbowl “America the Beautiful” ad. Economic downturns came and went and my Studio did just fine…. until Corona.
Not a week goes by when several of my students are out because they tested positive or aren’t feeling well and are afraid to leave the house. Gone are the days when we soldiered through fatigue or sniffles: nowadays, the remotest hint of being sick is reason to camp out at home for a month at a time. What has happened, in my opinion, is the swing from one negative extreme to the opposite negative extreme. We used to have a culture where nobody stayed home when they were sick. This was bad. Before he retired, my husband almost never stayed home from work when he was sick. There were many, many times where he went to work with a flu, with his back thrown out, or with a head injury. He was far from alone. Coronavirus made it OK for the salary class to stay home for any reason, real or fake. For the working classes, there were some noises made about heroism and bravery, but precious little actually changed. Nobody cares if the lady vacuuming the hallway at night has sniffles just as long as she sanitizes extra well to keep her lower class germs off the vacuum cleaner and the doorknobs.
The old Studio in happier days.
The piano I named Rex.
Set up for a piano recital.
Thanking the space on the chalkboard wall. The landlord made my husband and I erase it before we left.
Not much has changed about the elite CEO set. They subsist as parasites, but unlike tapeworms, it’s always summertime and the living is easy. Under the elite boss class is a huge army of women who do all the work. Among these women are a few beta males who must come to terms with their non-CEO status.
The Harem Model
People were nasty in the companies I worked for. Keep an army of women and beta males indoors for 45 hours or more a week, feed them microwaved “food”, and prevent them from interacting with their loved ones except by phone or the occasional day off of work, and you are guaranteed to drive an entire company's worth of workers insane. The American business pyramid model is similar to that of the lunatic asylums of old, but what it resembles even more closely is a harem. The Sultan, rarely seen but much worshipped, appears every now and then to uplift one of the concubines by sleeping with her. Meanwhile, the other concubines and an army of scheming eunuchs backstab and create endless conflicts with each other. Needless to say, the harem model of American business was not for me. I decided I would rather live with my parents forever and age out as an old maid than go that route. I wasn’t about to pour my energy into the failing American business model.
I briefly considered marrying a CEO type of the kind that proliferate in the rich neighborhood where I grew up. This avenue was open to me as a pretty, petite musical college graduate. Had I fallen into such a marriage, say to a stockbroker or a lawyer, I would have assumed my rank as one of the many artist women who married for comfort and money. Though it would have been much easier than the route I ended up taking, marrying for money is not always easy. As they say, when you marry for money, you never stop paying for it.
The Oddball Path
The Oddball Path
I struck out on my own. A kindly neighbor of my parents got me my first student, a nine year old girl named Maggie. I drove to her house in my car. One thing led to another and fairly soon I was driving all over the place to teach students in their homes. I quit my temp job — I could afford to do this because I was still living at home.
A few years later, I started working for a music store and a performing arts school, dividing my week between the two. I discovered along the way that I was much better at teaching music to beginners than performing the advanced piano pieces I preferred for myself. I also did some singing of original music at cafés. It was because of those shows, which never drew much of a crowd, that I became much better at performing and finally lost the stage fright that had plagued me since childhood. I was a very popular teacher wherever I went. By the late 1990s, I was teaching an average of fifty students a week.
In the early 2000s, I landed a gig teaching piano and guitar for a culture and arts center in town. I had all the benefits of working for myself and almost none of the drawbacks. The arts center kept me up to my ears in students. When they went belly up in the mid 2000s, the poop hit the fan. I had forty students and an upright piano and nowhere to teach them because I lived in an apartment. My husband, a talented builder, said that he would remodel my first commercial space.
A few years later, I started working for a music store and a performing arts school, dividing my week between the two. I discovered along the way that I was much better at teaching music to beginners than performing the advanced piano pieces I preferred for myself. I also did some singing of original music at cafés. It was because of those shows, which never drew much of a crowd, that I became much better at performing and finally lost the stage fright that had plagued me since childhood. I was a very popular teacher wherever I went. By the late 1990s, I was teaching an average of fifty students a week.
In the early 2000s, I landed a gig teaching piano and guitar for a culture and arts center in town. I had all the benefits of working for myself and almost none of the drawbacks. The arts center kept me up to my ears in students. When they went belly up in the mid 2000s, the poop hit the fan. I had forty students and an upright piano and nowhere to teach them because I lived in an apartment. My husband, a talented builder, said that he would remodel my first commercial space.
My Studio
The Kimberly Steele Studio was born. My husband and I found a modest 1200 square foot commercial space in a dingy office building on a busy stretch of road. He remodeled it and double-drywalled for sound abatement, finishing it with his signature professional paint job. Contracts were signed and utilities set up. I moved my students there. After the first few months, I was swimming in students. I started teaching voice.
Three years flew by. The lackadaisical landlord and the terrible state of the 1980s-era building were bad for business (heat outages and the building generally falling apart) so we looked for a nearby space to accommodate my thriving studio. We found that space across the street. My new landlord was a gem among landlords. He personally accompanied me to the City and helped me to set up all the details with people he knew in town. Overall he went above and beyond to make the transition as easy as it could possibly be. My husband once again labored night and day to improve the new space, and by the time he was finished, it was much improved. The majority of his work took place within a three month interim before the end of the old lease and the start of the new one because the new landlord gave us three months free of charge to move in. The students walked into a wonderful space with a professionally sound abated vocal booth, huge swaths of chalkboard walls, and ample parking.
Over the years, the Studio weathered many storms. Commercial neighbors came and went. The building was sold to a new landlord who wasn't as good as the old landlord, but was competent enough for a time.
Despite being surrounded by competitors, five within a one mile radius, to be exact, the Kimberly Steele Studio was a unique draw and I managed to keep a thriving business practice. The Studio had a certain relaxed vibe. In 2014, we recorded for the Coca-Cola Superbowl “America the Beautiful” ad. Economic downturns came and went and my Studio did just fine…. until Corona.
From 2016 - 2019, I had more business than I could handle. I hired other voice teachers to work in the Studio to take my overflow; it still wasn’t enough. The reputation of the Studio was stellar. Though we had students who could have placed on The Voice or America’s Got Talent, our main forte was helping the average student gain a certain comfort with music that would ensure they could learn it on their own once lessons were long over and done with. My greatest pride was hearing that students I taught a decade earlier were still playing and still loved making music. One of my former students called me to say she was starting up her own voice, piano, guitar, and recording studio in her state inspired by the Kimberly Steele Studio. I felt I had arrived.
Enter Coronatarianism
Then Coronavirus arrived on the scene, or more correctly, the reaction to Coronavirus made its debut. I had an unexpected two weeks off as I played along with everyone else. I went from forty students and several on a waitlist to fifteen students on Zoom. By May 2020, I had personally had enough and began to see the lockdowns as a controlled demolition of businesses like mine in order to transfer obscene amounts of wealth to big box stores and the pharmaceutical industry. I opened my doors again around that time, but the students did not come rushing back.
Since March 2020, my small business, which managed to survive several recessions, a near-complete lack of advertising budget, and a nearly invisible from the street location, has limped along after being kneecapped by Corona restrictions. Though I have no doubt I could save my commercial location with a combination of loans, deals with my landlord, and vigilant competitive advertising, the writing is on the wall. The new playing field stretches before all of us, and it is one of economic devastation and belt-tightening.
Aftermath
Aftermath
Not a week goes by when several of my students are out because they tested positive or aren’t feeling well and are afraid to leave the house. Gone are the days when we soldiered through fatigue or sniffles: nowadays, the remotest hint of being sick is reason to camp out at home for a month at a time. What has happened, in my opinion, is the swing from one negative extreme to the opposite negative extreme. We used to have a culture where nobody stayed home when they were sick. This was bad. Before he retired, my husband almost never stayed home from work when he was sick. There were many, many times where he went to work with a flu, with his back thrown out, or with a head injury. He was far from alone. Coronavirus made it OK for the salary class to stay home for any reason, real or fake. For the working classes, there were some noises made about heroism and bravery, but precious little actually changed. Nobody cares if the lady vacuuming the hallway at night has sniffles just as long as she sanitizes extra well to keep her lower class germs off the vacuum cleaner and the doorknobs.
In the interest of discretion, I won’t share any more information as to why I believe everyone in my heavily vaccinated area of northern Illinois is falling ill so frequently. You can read between the lines.
The benefit of having taught and worked in so many situations — retail, temping, teaching in-home lessons, teaching lessons at music stores, teaching lessons from my own commercial space — is the ability to see where things are going. I have seen many, many businesses fail because their owners refused to scale down when there is a downturn. I would rather not be one of those casualties.
The benefit of having taught and worked in so many situations — retail, temping, teaching in-home lessons, teaching lessons at music stores, teaching lessons from my own commercial space — is the ability to see where things are going. I have seen many, many businesses fail because their owners refused to scale down when there is a downturn. I would rather not be one of those casualties.
Now I embark upon a new era. Luckily for me, I have one of the most construction-savvy husbands on the planet. He singlehandedly built out the commercial locations I had over the years and he recently built a beautiful sound-abated vocal booth in what used to be our living room. The house is very small, so the music space meant the sacrifice of the normal living space. By the time this blog entry is published, I will be teaching out of my home studio. At this point, I will retain the majority of the twenty or so students that have kept the old Studio alive these past two years. Once the expenses of the transition are cleared, there is half a chance that I might be able to put away a rainy day fund. I have not been able to do that since 2018, when the Studio was running on all cylinders and I had healthy amounts of money coming in from side gigs. The home studio will never be as spacious and grand as the old Studio, but hopefully it will do.
Wish me luck, I’ll need it.
The old Studio in happier days.
The piano I named Rex.
Set up for a piano recital.
Thanking the space on the chalkboard wall. The landlord made my husband and I erase it before we left.
The new vocal booth in my tiny living room (door on the left) and Keiko the Yamaha piano in my home in Aurora.
no subject
Date: 2022-02-16 07:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-16 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-16 09:22 pm (UTC)Wishing you good luck and all the best for this next chapter of your studio.
Nona
no subject
Date: 2022-02-16 10:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-16 10:28 pm (UTC)I'm puzzled that the landlord made you erase the chalkboard, though. It just seems unnecessary or even counterproductive. Wouldn't knowing that the previous tenants genuinely loved the space help market it to whoever comes next? It's not like it was obscene or something that would take the landlord a lot of time to clean later, in which case it would have been understandable.
no subject
Date: 2022-02-16 10:45 pm (UTC)I am glad to be rid of that landlord. The old Studio was next to a house of prostitution that is still there. It's a massage parlor that deals in "happy endings". I never took action against them even though they are not even remotely legal. They moved in about three years ago. I have screenshots of their ads from the dark web. I got extremely tired of single, creepy men wandering over to my door asking "Is this the massage place" even though there was clear signage indicating that I was not in that line of business.
Good luck!
Date: 2022-02-16 11:25 pm (UTC)Re: Good luck!
Date: 2022-02-17 01:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-17 03:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-18 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-17 02:27 pm (UTC)I thought you might be pleased to know that your blog posts have inspired me to take classes with a self-employed piano teacher.
no subject
Date: 2022-02-18 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-17 03:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-18 04:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-17 05:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-18 04:14 pm (UTC)Blessings on Your New Studio
Date: 2022-02-18 12:05 am (UTC)Best to you,
Valerie
Re: Blessings on Your New Studio
Date: 2022-02-18 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-18 12:12 am (UTC)I'm sorry to hear just how much the maliciousness of the corona frenzy ruined your business, especially when it sounds like it had been doing so well. The worst thing is that I'm sure there are millions of similar stories like it from other small business owners across the world (I know a few myself). Controlled demotion is one word for it, but I liken it more to a boa constrictor slowly squeeze-and-releasing the life out of its prey, 'two weeks' at a time.
If I lived on the same continent, I would certainly take music lessons from you - I enjoy singing and have tried to take up the piano, cornet and guitar, but have been terrible at all of them to be honest (not just beginner-terrible, but unable-to-advance-beyond-beginner-terrible), and I now only sing in the car or to the dog, ever since I listened to a recording of myself singing 7 years ago. I feel like musical ability is not in my plan for this incarnation.
In any case, may your business prosper despite all adversities thrown at you. It sounds like you have a very practical husband as well! Could I ask how he got into the building trade? I am considering a career change in that direction myself.
Thank you for your posts here, they are always interesting and insightful (I enjoyed the corporate harem comparison particularly!).
Mr. Crow (a songbird I am not)
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Date: 2022-02-18 04:25 pm (UTC)LOL your musical experience sounds like my dancing. I only dance from the elbows down. I keep trying to train myself though. I'd like to be physically graceful in one of my future lives...
My husband is weird because he only does construction work if it is on my behalf. He's self-taught. If you have any talent at all for the trades, basically you can charge the Moon for it.
If you have any talent for assembling a crew of responsible tradesmen/women (easier said than done) then you'll make a tidy living.
You're welcome. Corporations have become disgusting. It's stupid because corporations were originally designed with limited purpose: the erection of a building, a single journey across the ocean by ship. Now they have become a prison-like lifestyle. "Depraved" is a fitting word for the corporate scene. "Vile" is another. I'm glad I got out while I was young.
no subject
Date: 2022-02-20 04:28 am (UTC)Joy Marie
no subject
Date: 2022-02-22 04:35 am (UTC)Wishing you luck
Date: 2022-03-12 05:58 pm (UTC)Miow