Jackie Blue: Detroit Band Writes Musical to Raise Funds for Charity

Rock band Jackie Blue has a history of giving back to communities, but its April 9th event "The Roaring 20's Masquerade Ball" is a stretch even by the bands standards. www.JackieBlue.com

(PRWEB) April 8, 2005 -- The Roaring 20s Masquerade Ball; Where Art, Music, Community & Business meet A charity event for Friends for the Dearborn Animal Shelter

Produced by
Jackie Blue and CatharticMedia
www.JackieBlue.com

Date: Saturday, April 9, 2005
Time: 7:00pm
Location: Severance Gallery, 2714 Riopelle St., Detroit, Michigan

Rock band Jackie Blue has a history of giving back to communities, but its April 9th event "The Roaring 20's Masquerade Ball" is a stretch even by the band's standards.

Combining live music, Roaring 20's inspired fashion show, audience participation, with great food & drinks, the band aimed to significantly up the stakes in raising funds for charities--in this case Friends for the Dearborn Animal Shelter. But that wasn't enough, to tie the entire show together; the band wrote and will be performing a musical about the history of Detroit during the Roaring 20's entitled: "Life is What You Make of it--The story of Nick Fudrich."

The Roaring 20's Masquerade Ball is the second event in a series that started in 2004 with the Halloween Masquerade Ball. This latest event builds on the earlier success and continues with the mission first developed several years ago by Tom Libertiny an art aficionado and member of Libertiny Financial: "Bring together, musicians, artists, creative people, local communities, churches and business folks in order to support local art AND raise funds for worthwhile charities."

For the Roaring 20's Masquerade Ball, Libertiny has partnered with Josefine, owner of Detroit's CatharticMedia who is managing the fashion show. The event will be held at Severance Gallery which has the look and feel of a 1920's Speakeasy. Brian Heath, a recognized video producer and owner of Splash Media Group, will be shooting a multi-camera video of the entire event for future release on DVD. Rounding out the team is Elaine Greene, Executive Director of Friends for the Dearborn Animal Shelter, this event's charity.

"All of us on this team have volunteered for a variety of local and national not-for-profits over the years," Libertiny says. "The artist community has done a good job of raising funds for the primary goal of charities, but we struggle to raise a smaller amount of money to keep their full-time operations running. The monthly fluctuation in available funds is very stressful for the hardworking staff and also takes time away from their primary goal."

Because we historically ask venues and artists to not only give of their time, but to do so without any monetary compensation, while most venues and artists agree to help, it's not their number one priority since they like to be able to "eat." Therefore they choose to participate in events that pay them first and we end up with only a few fund raising events per year.

In 2004, the Halloween Masquerade Ball changed all of that by paying both the venue and artists a fair amount of money while raising funds for Habitat for Humanity-Detroit: The combined artistic, community, and business model was proven successful. We're now focused on doing regular fund raising events throughout North America for worthwhile charities. This will go a long way to giving charities a regular source of money for their ongoing operations.

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