You can take a piece of Children of the Night home with you by bidding in our silent auction or buying a winning raffle ticket. Since we’re a new production company and are trying to keep our prop & costume budgets to a minimum, we plan to deaccession quite a few pieces at the end of the run. Our loss (and lack of storage space) can be your gain!
After the show is over, we don’t want to put our props and costumes away on shelves to gather dust. If you enjoy #ChildrenOfTheNight and want a memento, you can help us offset our production costs while adding a little bit of stage magic to your mantel or jewelry collection. Every dollar raised selling that dashing cavalry sabre, or grappling hook, or golden halberd is a dollar closer to getting out of the red and into the black. Ditto for stage worn jewelry; if something our actors and actresses modelled caught your fancy, there’s a good chance it can be yours on October 30th.
Our Prop Designer is still trying to convince everyone that he didn’t *buy too much*, he just “rented awesome stuff in a novel way”.
Closing times & procedures:
The raffle & silent auction will both be concluded *after* Children of the Night closes on 10/29/2022 (we need the props and costumes until then!). Some raffle tickets will be drawn at the intermission of the staged reading of Sleepy Hollow: Hex of the Headless Horseman and the rest will be drawn at the end of the evening. Ditto for the Silent Auction items – a few will close before the curtain opens when our founders give a speech about future plans, bidding on others will end during the intermission, and still more will close soon after the end of the reading.
If you have a ticket stub from #CotN, the stub gives you free admittance to #Hex (as space allows), and more tickets will be available at the door on 10/30/2022. So, one way to win at the silent auction would be to bring 300 of your closest friends to the reading to guarantee getting the last bid… but that would be cheating! 🙂
Silent Auction vs. Raffle items
The plan is to raffle off the big ticket / one-of-a-kind items (like swords, cast-signed-playbills, & impressive jewelry) and to make bidsheets with photos illustrating the more modest items that helped make the show (EG: a character defining necklace, holy water flask, bondage decor, etc). So, we will have a mix of things you can gamble on winning, or if you prefer certainty, you can lock items into your collection by calmly fighting for them with your checkbook.
The raffle tickets will be discounted by volume – that is, if you buy more, you get a lower cost per raffle ticket. 1 ticket for $1, 6 tickets for $5, 13 tickets for $10, 27 tickets for $20, 55 tickets for $40… If you want to buy more than $40 of tickets, we can probably work something out. For certain events, like our blood donation night & costume contests, we may also give out additional raffle tickets to prime the pump. But remember – all it takes to win is a single ticket!
With the silent auction, we’ll use bid sheets. To avoid a long call-and-answer process, the silent auction will start on the first day of the run. Before the curtain rises, during intermissions, and after the show, look for our silent auction table to find which items are available and what price they’ve been bid up to. We’ll start everything at a dollar, so there will probably be some great deals!
Need not be present to win
You need not be present to win at the close of the silent auction on October 30th (although if you aren’t, you’ll need to come by during office hours at MainStage to pick up your goodies). You can also make arrangements to have them shipped to you. Make sure to leave a good phone number and e-mail so we can get in touch if you win. In the coming weeks, we’ll add some more information on the site about which items MainStage Irving * Las Colinas has decided are surplus to their future needs. In other words, we are waiting to hear which pieces will be included in the raffle and auction!
We also have some free contests going on that you might want to check out. And, if you have any ideas or suggestions about how we can improve our raffle/auction process or other fundraising ideas for producing future shows, please let us know in the comments below.