138 Flyers In My Bag And Zero Viral Moments
On selling out a show the old fashioned way and why analog might be the most radical thing left
If you're also quietly slipping away from the scroll and wondering if real connection still works, this one's for you.
I’m determined to sell out 220 seats in the middle of March. With flyers. And actual conversations with strangers.
I know.
I’m a musical theater actress who writes and performs her own shows. I should be all-in on social media, hustling in the digital marketplace, building my personal brand. Instead I’m carrying 138 half-printed flyers in my bag and talking to my barista about local theater.
No algorithms were optimized in that conversation. No engagement metrics were harmed. Just two humans discovering a shared interest in real time, without a single perfectly crafted Instagram story to document it.
The digital evangelists would call this inefficient. Why reach one person when you could reach thousands? They’re not wrong about the math. But they’re missing the magic. When I hand someone a flyer after a genuine conversation that paper carries the weight of a real connection. It’s not another sponsored post sliding past their thumb. It’s a tangible reminder of an actual moment we shared.
When they come to my show they’re not a metric. They’re the person who told me about their first theater experience while making my latte.
The Old School Approach
Here’s what selling out a show actually looks like without a viral moment:
I have students backing me up on a song, giving them a chance to perform in a professional setting. Instead of charging them for the prep lessons I asked them to sell six to eight tickets each. Four people from the dog park bought tickets after months of actual conversation. My mailing list is a beautiful mess of thirty years in the performing arts, an accumulation of dance classes, voice lessons, workshops, and performances. I don’t even know who half of them are. They know me though. It’s the opposite of targeted marketing and I kind of love that.
I’ve kept a small presence on Facebook and Instagram but outsourced the posting. It feels like maintaining a forwarding address while moving to a new home. Necessary maybe, but not where the real living happens.
What’s Actually Going On
Every other Substack article right now seems to be about leaving social media. We’re all writing our digital exodus stories, which is a little ironic, but it speaks to something real. People are fed up with the constant performance, the endless optimization, the hollow connections.
The wisdom we keep circling back to isn’t new. Build genuine relationships. Create value. Connect with your community. We just forgot these fundamentals in the rush to go viral.
The work deepens when you stop packaging your creative process into bite-sized content. My shows aren’t being written to be shareable or Instagram friendly. They’re being written to be good. To be true. To be worth a stranger’s time when they take a chance on a flyer from a woman they met at a coffee shop.
The real living happens in the unexpected conversations. The imperfect moments. The connections that can’t be optimized or scaled. It happens in theater seats and coffee shops, in handed out flyers and chance encounters. In the spaces between screens where humans have been finding each other for millennia.
Maybe that’s why so many of us are migrating offline. We’re remembering what it feels like to earn things. To build things that last longer than a news feed refresh. To have conversations that aren’t being monitored by invisible algorithms.
We’re remembering what it feels like to be human.
And no, I won’t be sharing this on my Instagram story. I might tell you about it if we meet for coffee though.
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