Good afternoon, everyone.
I spent my weekend phoneless at the Phoebe Bridgers concert, crying with pink-haired teenagers. On Saturday, I made Alison Roman’s Gorgeous Chili, and on Sunday I woke up to the devastating news that my beloved 2004 Camry that I was keeping in my parents’ driveway was smashed by a massive tree that fell down during the nor’easter. I’ll keep you posted on what Progressive tells me this week. The good news is I still have chili leftovers and the rain has just stopped.
Today’s newsletter includes: Get paid $150k to design merch for Jane Street, Vogue is making nightgowns, Esther Povitsky and Caroline Goldfarb on why they’re bringing back their Glowing Up podcast (after canceling it in 2021), someone needs to adopt Martin Shkreli’s cat, Nitehawk’s bogus new QR codes, a zine fair for independent food magazines, and an interview with a wedding band on what this past weekend was like.
THIS WEEK ON THE FEED ME JOB BOARD
🥑 Brand General Manager at Masa Chips. Masa, the fastest-growing healthy snack brand in the U.S., is looking for someone to own their positioning, target consumer, and long-term direction. ($165,000-$200,000)
📱 Creative Strategist at Applovin. Gist is a new consumer social app built by AppLovin. They’re building a creative engine from the ground up, and are looking for a Creative Strategist who lives at the intersection of storytelling and performance data. ($71,000-$107,000)
🥩 Marketing Manager at Golden Steer. Golden Steer is a digitally native food brand and restaurant company anchored by the original Golden Steer Steakhouse in Las Vegas with a second location now open in New York City at One Fifth Avenue. They’re hiring a Marketing Manager to be the operating engine behind marketing across all three of our businesses: our seasonings eCommerce line, Golden Steer Las Vegas, and Golden Steer New York. ($95,000-$115,000)
“Brides are weeping up and down the East Coast.” By Daniel Riley
In the winter of 2020, about six minutes before Covid postponed a year’s worth of weddings, I wrote a magazine story about the Sultans, the biggest and best wedding band in America, and their ebullient band leader, Jerry Bennett. The Sultans began as a five-man bar band in Martha’s Vineyard in the mid-’80s and have expanded over the decades into a 120-plus person collective that plays 200-plus weddings and events per year. When you hire them for your wedding, they give you a diagnostic (I know; they played mine) to determine precisely which of their players, and which of their songs, in which particular order, will rock your friends and family just right.
Yesterday, Jerry contacted me out of the blue to say that this weekend was a Sultans all-timer. Twelve weddings up and down the Eastern Seaboard—from Delray Beach, Florida, to northern Vermont, with gigs in Maryland, Stonington CT, the Vineyard, and Nantucket (3x)—during a rare “tented wedding season” nor’easter. I cut Jerry off before he could share too much, and put some questions to him instead.
Was this a record number of weddings in a weekend?
We have done 15 before but I limited it to 12. Unfortunately we had 8 right on the water, including coastal New Jersey, where the tent blew down. In Delray Beach, Florida, it was gorgeous and 85. But in ACK and MV, it was gusting to 60.
When did clients start freaking out with the weather forecast—and how do you manage that? Did anyone cancel last minute?
We all pray Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday at first notice, like with hurricanes. Typically with weather alerts, they mostly seem to go the other direction, but this one was getting worse (which means about 120 musicians, and a few thousand revelers are screwed, travel-wise). But…
Tell us some stories of the day-of—how did you get to all these places and how did it go?
The funny stories will keep rolling in today, people are still shell shocked. So, on Friday when apparently the worst is occurring, and we’re getting conflicting reports left and right (planes are going, not going, etc.), is when I began to wonder if I wanted to be alive at all with what was impending.
Everything is changing, all at once, suddenly a musician drops out, the ferry service is suspended, and the client is all over us with: “Why didn’t they come over Thursday?” (Answer: they have lives, they are single parents, sole providers of invalid relatives, kids have dance recitals, one of our wonderful lady singers was just too scared, etc.) So everyone is freaking out, every update is worse than the one before, brides are weeping up and down the East Coast, parents lose their minds and make unreasonable demands left and right, pure chaos because no info is solid, from any direction, weather, client wishes, band refusals to go over. It was at this moment, early Saturday morning, that we decided to hire a local charter company to do charter runs ($$$) to get people on and off the islands. Everyone said forget it, this is not weather for a Cessna. But there were three weddings on Nantucket, we had to try.
Now anyone that flies into MV or ACK on a weekend sees dozens of private jets, many Learjets, and so I was able to get the name of a corporate jet company, Flying Zebras, out of White Plains. When everyone else said no, Henry said no problem, and I hired him for 3 trips over and 2 trips back (after the first one the girls begged to stay overnight instead). So we sent over everyone we could, making sure we had the key ingredients: a rhythm section and vocals. First trip 7K, subsequent others 5K each, return 7k plus 5k return. These clients spend this every weekend, there was no other way.
Interesting sidebar, my bedraggled crew arrived at the airport in White Plains to be treated like Fortune 500 CEOs, would you like a cocktail or some snacks, Mister So-and-So. Most of these guys have never been called mister in their lives. Then off the plane, to the wedding. All the rooms are screwed up as well, so we don’t know where to tell people to go, just clusterfuck city. Twenty-four musicians were treated like royals for the 8-minute flight to ACK. We are hoping that the three wedding parties will at least get drums, keys, guitar, vocs, and sort it out later, and share in the cost, splitting it across all 3, we’ll see, I’m not holding my breath. They were already fighting over who gets what singer, no cooperation at all.
Was this the worst storm for a peak wedding weekend in your career—or did you have three weddings during Hurricane Andrew or something?
This was by far the worst. 2023 had a bad one. I had a band stuck on Block Island til Wednesday.