Just when you think everything is going your way...

BAM, you get slapped in the face. It seems that we are going to get screwed on the Sponsorship that we have been waiting almost 2 months on. Ugh. As most of you know we ran the auction and were contacted by a company that they were interested. We talked, waited, waited some more and waited for almost 2 months. We had a reserve on the auction for $35,000. The auction was for Misty's medical bills, to help get the 2006 Tour started and to help us get back on our feet because all the bills started piling up. Everyone started pitching in for Misty's medical bills which really drained our Tour fund that we had saved up. Not to mention that Gina's rig went out for some unknown reason. Our main board went out and Misty needs a new amp for her rig, Kym needs a new rig and just a few other things that we needed replaced. Another huge thing that the money was going to was to get the CD finished, mastered and duplicated. Well apparently there was this Huge mis-communication about the sponsorship and they wanted to give us $10,000. Here is the thing..... $10,000 will not cover the things we need. Also 10% of that was supposed to go to the Lupus Foundation which was really cool. So we were looking at $9,000 after the 10%. After we get Misty caught up on her Insurance (which she is about to lose) and after getting the equipment to even play the shows we wouldn't have anything left over. Literally, nothing...well actually, we wouldnt have enough at all.
Somewhere in the two months of talking about the auction, when it turned into a sponsorship, much of the advertisement oppertunities that we were offering grew into something a lot bigger. We were prepared to help them reach out to the gay & lesbian communities, a demographic they said they wanted to get to, by putting adds and write ups in every major G&L newspaper, periodicle and online publication we could find. So then we had plans to get on various talk shows from, Ellen to Jimmy Kimmel to talk about what Golden Palace was doing for us and the Lupus Foundation. These talk shows were a shoe in but as we were told, they needed a good story. Oh and something else really cool, I am sure most of you have seen the new Miami Ink show on TLC. They are a cool Tattoo shop in Miami so if you havent seen the show check it out! We were all going to Miami Ink to get tattoos and Dillon was going to get GoldenPalace.com on his arm. Well if that's something that they wanted, either way we were all going to get tattoos. So that would have been good publicity to be on that show for them as well. We were also going to mention them in the sleeve of our CD and on the different sites the CD will be sold. Amazon & CD Baby. Also, we are doing the James Brown PreGrammy show again not to mention the big show we are playing on December 11th, the White Rock Marathon in Dallas which we will be on their DVD, we are headlining the whole thing. Plus it is televised. So bascially their Logo would have been in all these places.
Another thing, Misty's brother was going to advertise on his Trailor. Most of you know that he is a professional Team Roper and some of these Rodeos are on ESPN. I mean the guy travels weekly! 2-3 rodeos a week, ALL over the states, not just Texas. You guys can see in the last post that we have 19 cities scheduled at the time, with more on the way.
So I am sure that you can see that $10,000 just won't do it. As much as we need the money we are not able to take that offer. We were told that they were going to get back with us yesterday but since then they have not called nor are they answering or returning our calls and emails.
Of course they may be going over this again and may come back with another offer or we may never hear from them again, which seems to be the case. I think that if they were "talking" it over we would have at least gotten a phone call or even returned our call telling us what was going on. A phone call is the right thing to do. It's just bad business to conduct things this way. So basically we have all these things, shows, etc set into motion and we have these promoters and booking people calling us back and we have to hold them off because we don't know anything.. ( which makes US look really bad ) If you blow these people off about the shows, they don't ever book you again and we can not afford to have that reputation.
I am assuming that Golden Palace was thinking that we were this small time band that has just gotten started and that we play shit hole bars or something, which as you know isnt the case..lol
Now all this time has passed and we only have TWO freakin weeks left! Which just pisses me off to no end. If they had talked with us about what was going on or told us that they just wanted to do a small sponsorship we would have been making other means, looking for other sponsorships, etc. We wouldnt have wasted all this time. We are in such a bind right now and I can't stress that enough. Two weeks! After that we have to move Kym down here somehow, get started on the CD, because the CD has to be finished completely before the Tour otherwise we wont have it to sell on the road, not to mention we need the CD for publicity for the Tour! This is just such a mess. I can't believe we waited almost 2 months on this, we should have known better I guess. Ah, you live you learn right? So either we are going to rerun the auction or hurry like hell to find another sponsor or both... lol
The worst part of all of this is that Misty feels that this is all her fault. We had the money for our 2006 Tour and we had to use it for her and everyone else chipped in as well. She is taking this worse than the rest of us even though we are all frantic. It breaks my heart though. You put trust into someone you don't know and get your hopes up and get let down like this. It's horrible.
So please forgive us if we don't update as often in the next two weeks, we are going to be working our little butts off trying to get everything taken care of. We are trying like hell to get to your city or somewhere close! I promise. Somehow we will get there, dont worry.
**Sara, when we get the tour in motion we will make sure to book somewhere near you girl! You just bring lots of people with ya! Deal?

Alright everyone, it is bed time for us. Hope everyone is well. We are going to have some new music and some videos for you real soon. Gina is going to also record one cover song maybe every day or every other day and upload it to myspace.
So start getting your requests in. When you request a song just go to the new Message Board that we added the other night. I will make a section for it there.
Then go to myspace and listen for your song!

Take care
FTL