As a former Mader’s waiter, what would you say sells better: theater tickets or sauerbraten?
MB: Sauerbraten. Mader’s has been going since 1902, God bless them, and they are still open. I was there for 20 years, and it actually taught me a lot about management and money. When I started the theater, I was working both jobs at the same time. After the first eight years, people started telling me, “You can’t run the Boulevard like it’s your own station in a restaurant.” I listened and that was a mistake. We are trained to think that if we follow a standard set of rules it will lead to success, but what it leads to is homogenization and a staleness of the soul. If I were talking to my past self or another young person, I would say, “Go off and run your own theater company or your own gallery, but shut it down after five years and then go somewhere else and start all over again. Don’t let it get to the middle level, because the middle level is a desert.” It’s like you can make that jump from the first to the middle level, but it’s very difficult to get from the middle to the top le
