Will Act For Food is the scrappy Chicago theater company who likes to fight hunger and rock your face. Our shows may be a little weird, but so are we, and we’re okay with that. We’re also a company who really likes to do stuff outside of producing theater, it seems. Maybe all that hunger-fighting and face-rocking just isn’t enough for us, so we’re always seeking to try new things and play with others:

• We invited you all to learn and share when we brought The 18th Emergency, a Real Live Afterschool Special, to the stage as part of It Came From The Neo-Futurarium 6.
• We braved nearly-unceasing rain while entertaining delighted crowds for hours when we were set up in the Miro Plaza during Chicago’s Looptopia Festival.
• We held a lot of BBQ’s. Maybe you didn’t come to those. But let us know if you want in, and we’ll invite you next time, for reals. Sometimes we call them WAFF-ecues, fair warning.
• We jumped around Millennium Park and shook our groove things while swaddled in curious experimental art garments created by students at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Fashion Invasion and ART Chicago opening. That one was weird, even for us.
• And Theater Wars? Yeah, we’re not just champions, we’re TWO-TIME Champions. Maybe we’ll make it three someday, if anyone ever calls for a rematch. (oh snap- yes we did!)

Now we are about to take another bold step into The Unknown. WAFF is going to be racing, performing, and probably drinking in the 6th annual Chiditarod. If you are not familiar with this “Chiditarod” word, here is what you need to know:

• It’s a race like the Iditarod… but in Chicago, and with shopping carts instead of dog sleds.
• The shopping carts are full of food to be donated to the Chicago Anti-Hunger Federation.
• The event is an amazing and overstimulating white-hot ball of pure concentrated magical awesomeness, and we’re giddy as all hell to be participating.

WAFF is going to be racing as a game show on wheels pulled by a fleet of Richard Dawsons and Vanna Whites, inviting all who dare to spin the WAFF Wheel-of-Fun On Wheels (WAFFWOFOW) which entitles you to a splendid performance, a test of wits, a fabulous prize, or maybe… ALL THREE of these things.

The specifics of the race remain a secret until Race Day, but we can tell you this:

The Chiditarod is taking place on Saturday, March 5th at High Noon.

We hear the starting line is at the corner of Wolcott and Hubbard, but for the most up-to-date details, keep an eye on the official Chiditarod website.

Holy buckets of chum, it’s going to be a good time. Want to make it even better? You can:

• Donate food. We have to cross the finish line with 42 pounds of nonperishable food, but we’d like to cross it with way more than that. Let us know if you can sling something our way, and we’ll figure out how to get it from you. Say, you could bring it with you if you…
• Attend the race. Seriously, why would you not? It’s a race with hundreds of costumed people tied to shopping carts. We’d love to see your face and hear the mouth part of your face shrieking words of encouragement as we lug our game show cart around the race course. We want you to Spin the Wheel and Win a Prize!
• Donate Money. Maybe you are already busy that day. Maybe you don’t have time to go to the grocery store. Maybe you live thousands and thousands of miles away, but you want to support this effort. And so, we enable you to directly donate to the Chicago Anti-Hunger Federation on behalf of WAFF and the Chiditarod through our team page.
• Spread the Word. Tweet (#chiditarod), like us on Facebook as much as you do in real life, strike up conversations with attractive strangers on the train, tell everyone that WAFF’s racing the Chiditarod and you think that’s damn swell.

Hope to see you there. We’re really excited. Rock on and on and on.

It’s been a wild ride, everybody. But we did it. One of 15 Chicago theater companies in the top 200, Will Act For Food finished in 164^th place. We are so excited to see what’s to come.

Of course we didn’t do it alone. We’re resourceful and scrappy, but there’s only 10 of us and we’re not magicians. We received such an outpouring of help and support that we wanted to give a little shout-out right here and now to a few people who made the difference.

Our fellow Chicago theater companies, who could have engaged in cutthroat competition chose instead to come together and support each other throughout this crazy race, sending help to others and rocking the vote for all of us: CIC, GreyZelda, WildClaw, Mortar Theater, Strawdog, Stage Left, Theatre Seven, Backstage, and the rest. You guys are total rock stars, and we are honored and humbled to be a part of your community.

Our friends, fans, and supporters who went above and beyond the call of everything to publicly encourage others to vote for us and help us stay in the running: F. Tyler Burnet, Rebecca Zellar, RESCU Foundation (congrats!), Move For Hunger (congrats!), Chicago Cares, Brian Amidei, Anton Heacock, Tom Schorsch, Team ADMA (esp. Sally, Azar, Nick, and Dan), Andrea Crews, Amanda Paules, TRAVIS BEDARD, Kim Maddox, Lakeview Pantry, Ben Housten, and many many more that we don’t even know about. Thank you all from our collective WAFFly heart-bottoms. We’re working on inventing words to express our gratitude, but we keep getting misty so it’s slow going. You understand.

And to all of the 1,567 voters who had to plaster a blue hand logo onto their profile to help us out, we say it again: THANK YOU. You have truly made a difference both for us and for Chicago’s hungry. You gave us a hand, which will help us give them a hand. Thank you for believing in us. Thank you for giving us your sweet sweet clicks.

THANK YOU.

Ha. Kidding.

We were pleasantly surprised to find ourselves in the top 200. We were even more pleasantly surprised to find ourselves staying there. Okay then, we said, let’s go for it. We tweeted, we sent Facebook messages, we wrote notes and cajoling status updates… just like everyone else did. The resulting caucophony was all of Chicago Theaterdom rooting and voting for each other, and all saying pretty much the same thing:

VOTE FOR US!

Sure, okay. But why?

The short answer is we could really really use the money. Theater is rarely considered a Real Charity outside our own community, and getting funding is tough. Nothing new there, right?

WAFF tries not to ask for donations (full disclosure: we did hold a Bowl-a-thon in 2006) as a general rule. We also, in case you haven’t been paying attention, accept food in lieu of cash for admission to our shows, which goes to local organizations who can get it to where it is needed in the community. We average 500-700 pounds of food donated per production. Not being math people, we can’t really tell you how many meals that makes, but multiply it by all the shows we’ve produced in our 12 years of existence (not counting the extra food we’ve brought in at festivals and through partnerships with other theater companies), and you get something like “holy-wow that’s a lot.”

So of course we don’t make a lot of money. And we always struggle as a result of it. Space for performance and rehearsals is not cheap for a company without a place to call home. That monster eats up about half (or more) of our budget for every single production. And chasing spaces drains time and resources that could be put to better use. It would be magical to just be able to focus on the production and our mission. If we can collect as much food as we do in our present situation, imagine how many people we could feed if that situation was improved, even temporarily.

Call it a cushion, a relief, a freebie. It would be welcomed, offered a drink, and told to kick off its shoes and stay a while.

Now, in our little WAFFly dreams, we would love to team up with a few other companies to put down some real roots and establish residency in a shared space:

• It would facilitate collaboration and sharing of resources as well as foster opportunities to grow all the companies involved, both organizationally and artistically.

• Having established ourselves in a neighborhood, we would be better able to offer more community engagement; classes, events, workshops, etc.

• Setting up a permanent food collection site would enable and encourage our patrons, those of our partner companies, and the general public to donate.

• We would be able to really focus our energies on our missions, while also creating some breathing room for experimentation and risk-taking.

There’s more, of course. It goes without saying that we’d love to be able to pay our artists more, participate in more community events, etc. But not being chicken-counters, we’ll try to reign it in at the moment. The bottom line is that we’d love to grow. We want to have the freedom to do more artistically as well as to increase our contribution to the Chicago community. And we want to do it working with friends.

WAFF wants to continue supporting the community for a very long time;
we just need a little support from you to make that happen.
Thank you with a capital THANK YOU.

Will Act For Food

Andrew Jordan, Corri Feuerstein, CW van Baale, Jill Frederickson, Melissa Tropp, Scott Pasko
Catherine Dughi, Eric Frederickson, Jenna Rabideaux, Missy Styles

And hey, any potential partners reading this and want to talk more? Let’s grab a beer some time. Drop us a line with the subject line “Flippy Scoop Bop.” Just because it’ll give us a giggle.