K is for Kid Chapter 8

The days leading up to "the first Kronos show" were really exciting. I made a poster, Kris slapped the Kronos Logo and font on it, we set up a botched sound system of amps and microphones. And of course, we made a Facebook page for the event.

"Is there anything else we need to do?" I asked Kris.
"Eh, I don't know, there is something missing." He said staring at the blank brick wall behind what we called the "stage area". "We need a banner. Does the band have a banner?"
"No they don't." I said.
"Hmmm." He disappeared into the closet.
"We put up posters all over town!" Mae said as her and Mandy bounded up the stairs. "I mean everywhere! We put them on walls, cars, lamp posts, stop signs, strollers, old people.."
We all laughed.
"Great! Hopefully we will have a good turn out!" I said.
Kris came back into the room with a huge roll of canvas. "Think we can do anything with this?" He asked dropping it on the floor.
"Do you have paint?" I asked.
"Follow me" He said walking back to the closet. Inside were buckets and buckets of paint. I grabbed a bucket of black, a bucket of red, and a bucket of white.
I walked back into the show room and held the bucket up. "Paint Party?" I asked. Before I knew it we had the canvas rolled out on the side walk, rolled up our sleeves and pants legs, took of our shoes, and were practically swimming in paint. We covered the entire canvas in black, red, and white hand and foot prints. And maybe a few butt prints. Then we wrote the word "KRONOS" in big white sloppy paint letters across the front. Kris stuck his head out of the window above us. "Looks Great!" he said. "That's perfect!" When it dried we hung it up on that blank brick wall, and stood back to admire our work.

On the day of the show, none of us could contain our excitement. Kris had hung up new art work and I found a fresh sharpie to mark peoples hands with. Then we waited.
A few minutes before 7 the band showed up. Brian and his friends pulled their equipment up the stairs and begun setting up and checking their sound. Mae had gone out and bought everyone a round of Monsters, so once everything was set up we sat around drinking our monsters and waited for people to show up. Eventually they started rolling in. Kris turned on his playlist, and turned down the lights. And the show started.
When it was over I started to split the door money between the band and the gallery. Brian walked up "Hey listen. We don't want any money for this, this time, ok?"
"What? Why?" I asked.
"Well, we really like this place. And Kris had told us before the show how glad he was this was happening, and how much this kind of thing will help keep the gallery around. We want it to stay around too you know? So we figured all of the money should go back into this place so that we will have the opportunity to play again." Brian said.
"DUDE, that is freakin' awesome." I ran to tell Kris. He came out and started hugging the band.
"Really?" he asked. "You guys don't know how awesome that is."
We dubbed the night as the start of something.
"You know 20 people isn't a bad turn out." I said to Kris after the band had left. I had figured the band meant what they said about wanting this place to continue. But we had only made a 100 bucks that night. I had planned on giving the band $60 and the gallery $40. I knew it wasn't much but I had hoped maybe it could help somewhere. But the entire $100 would certainly help! "I mean 20 people isn't bad for our first show. You know?"
"Yea. And maybe if we pull in more than one band we'd also pull in more people." Kris said.
"Yea that could happen. If we have more bands we could charge more too." I said. "And you know once people know that this is here, and that we are booking shows, we will get more people. No doubt about that."
Kris smiled. "Well then that is what we have to do."