"If you just rely as a theater company on putting butts in seats, it's real hard to make ends meet."

Probably little else needs to be said about this Crain's article describing comedy troupe's intermingling with advertising except that, umm, when you join a theater company, isn't that what you do? Attempt to rely on butts in seats and then work real hard as a waiter to actually pay off the bills?

Also, that I have been reading S. J. Perelman lately. And on the topic of those persons whom, for wont of another way to pay off their hotell bills, don costumes and parade about town in an effort to expand sales of, say, peanuts, or chicken sausage, or motor oil, he had this to say (albeit in the satirized voice of one such practitioner):

"I'm only a cog in a might machine . . . but I'm proud of my calling. Someone has to lift those bales of cotton; someone's got to merchandize those nuts. Dub me a visionary, a dreamer, idealist if you will—my company's stockholders are depending on me to put this quarter's earnings over the top, and, by the eternal, I won't let them down!" —"Is You Is Or Is You Ain't, Goober Man?"

See also: "Le Plume de Mon Ami Est dans le Flapdoodle." You will not be sorry.