April News

The Committee meeting at the beginning of the month began with a sad moment. Lynn Halliday sent in a letter of resignation from the Board of FOTA. Now that she has been elected to the Board of SALVA they have told her she must resign from FOTA and we shall miss her. Fotunately she will not be far away and remains committed to what we do. As Lynn had been Vice Prsident of FOTA a replacement was needed and we are lucky that Pauline Naylor accepted the position. Lynn had also been membership secretary and Helen Tomlinson agreed to do this.

Our Trips have been very successful this year. The last one was fully booked and a bigger coach had to be ordered. The current trip to Tarifa and Baelo Claudia is full (though if you want to go we shall be at the desk tomorrow -April 22nd - in case of cancellations) and already some bookings are in for the trip to see the patios of Cordoba. After that we have a visit to the Farmer's Market at Álora and a picnic at the Lakes which this year are quite full (I hear a groan from winter visitors but we did need the rain). Bright ideas are needed for trips for next season. All in all a big thank you to Gina for organising these.

The next discussion point was a bit tricky. Sweelan Ford offered at the last SALVA AGM to prepare a booklet on the history of the theatre to mark the 25th anniversary. SALVA agreed to this but didn't offer any financial backing. The information has been gathered together and Barry Suart is editing it but the finance for the project was not in place. The selling price of the booklet will be 5 euros and it will need 300 coies sold to break even. Some Committee members could not see a market, even at the most optimistic, of more than a 100 which would leave a loss of a thousand euros. By a majority the Board of FOTA agreed to back the project and make every effort to ensure that sufficient copies would be sold. So now let's hope that we can all persuade as many people as possible to buy the booklet when it comes out in September.

Another 1000 euros was handed to SALVA for the theatres reserves. This makes the total donations from FOTA for this season 23000 euros.

Our final item is date for your diary and is the AGM on June 3rd. By rotation Graham Cherry, Pat Suart, Helen Young and Norma Wilson will be retiring and will be standing for re-election. It would be a great help if any further names could be passed to the President (David Radford) or Secretary (Graham Cherry).