TRIGGER WARNING: performer vulnerability, financial chaos
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore
I asked my FB family recently if they had any questions for me that I could cover in this column—hey, I definitely run on creative fumes sometimes!—and a fellow artist asked how do I deal with cheque-processing on the road; that was the hardest part for her about her 2011 tour, getting money from Canada to her US bank account. Of course, she had to worry about paying bills back home, and “maybe that wasn’t an issue for you.”
Of course I LOLed. Actually, I don’t do that acronym, so I just did this:
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Now, the brass-tacks moving-of-money question is a little too specific for this space; people have all different ways of doing it, depending on your bank and your Internet savvy. Personally, this winter I’m opening up a Canadian chequing account.
But bills, yes. Of course I have them. How do I pay them? Barely, and with teeth-grinding despair. Because where is the money? I wait for payment, and wait and wait. Sometimes I get cash after shows. Sometimes it’s a cheque that could clear immediately or might take six to eight weeks to clear. Sometimes it’s delayed wire transfer that makes me want to claw my eyes out with frustration; One prominent Montreal festival—NOT the fringe—has yet to return my calls regarding the $2700 they owe me for my 13-show run in July. My income from phone sex plummets when I am touring, usually by at least half, and when I was in the UK for seven weeks, well, there are seven weeks where I am not getting any phone-sex money at all. I have a perennial cash-flow problem.
