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Show The University is in dire need of a middle sized, 5000 seat auditorium. We have the Q Sports and Special Events Center (SEC) with 15,000 seats. Kingsbury and the O Union Ballroom have less . a than 2000 seats each. Pioneer MB Memorial Theater is smaller than Kingsbury, but larger than the Fine Arts Auditor-ium Auditor-ium and Orson Spencer Hall Auditorium which both seat around 400. The Little Theater has seating for only 166. So where do you put on a "Youngbloods" Concert with 4000 people attending? In the SEC, leaving 11,000 seats empty? In the Union ballroom ball-room with 2000 people turned away or standing, defying de-fying the firemarshall? Where do you hold the Susskind-McCarthy-Kerr-Peterson panel discussion with 3000 people wanting to listen? In the SEC, in Kingsbury, in OSH auditorium? There is no middle sized hall where such concerts, lectures, lec-tures, and films can be shown. This makes it difficult diffi-cult not only for programming program-ming of events, but also for the performers and the audience. The Union ballroom ball-room with limited seating of less than 2,000 people and poor sound equipment makes it impractical to program events costing over $5,000. Enough people cannot be brought in to pay the bills unless the price of tickets is of necessity extravigent, or the sponsoring group takes a financial loss. It is even more impractical to schedule such an event in the SEC. The cost of the building, the thousands thou-sands of empty seats, and the enormity of building makes holding concerts and lectures not only a risk but an imposition imposi-tion on the artist. It is recognized that a new 5,000 seat auditorium would cost money, probably a great deal of money. We do have the old field house, which sat 5,000 people at basketball games, that could be remolded re-molded into a striking auditorium. audi-torium. It's location is excellent excel-lent being close to the highway and to the stadium Parking lot. .The University needs an auditorium of this size more than it needs a marching field for ROTC or mdoor tennis courts, or a winter golfing range. Student government should push for the remolding of the old field house into a new auditorium even t o the point of issuing bond to pay expenses (as the students did for the libr ry jnd the Special Events Cen- We ask the administration to recognize this need, and work with the students to correct it now. |