Tell me about Up With People

Cafe Society
1

Back in the early 90s, my family hosted a couple of Up With People performers. We went to their show, and it was a lot of fun. They encouraged my to audition for the group, and I did. The interviewer told me they accept less than 1 in 10 auditions. I was accepted, and felt pretty good about it at the time. However, it turned out it cost something like 18K to go on tour with them, and I didn’t see a way to raise that kind of scratch, so I never went.

Now that I’m older, I’m looking back, and it sure smells like a scam to me. 18K per performer, with probably 40 performers and another 40+ folks backstage? All housing on the road is provided by volunteers? You still pay for food out of your pocket while touring? And they charge a reasonable ticket price for performances and sell merchandise?

OK, so each tour group brought in around 150K in fees for the year. There were 5 such groups. Tickets to performances are 20 bucks a head. Call it 1000 seats per performance, 3 performances a weekend, 50 weeks a year, times 5 groups, is 750K in ticket revenue, and I’m probably vastly underestimating that. Note that the merchandise was fairly spendy and adds a ton to the bottom line, I’m sure. Their costs are the costumes and sets, and the buses for travel. Everything after that looks like pure profit for whoever runs the organization.

So, is this a giant scam? Are they really just collecting gigantic paychecks from every possible direction, generally by exploiting the enthusiasm of youth? Or is there something I’m missing here?

2

Well, it’s an offshoot of Moral Re-Armament, a conservative Christian group that was founded by a Nazi sympathizer and is often called a cult. As far as I know though, UWP is not associated with that stuff either anymore or at all.

3

It can’t be that great of a profit machine, since the organization went broke and had to suspend operation for a year while it reorganized.

The wiki article isn’t especially well written, but it seems clear there’s a community service component to the program, as well as the performances. IMHO the performances are probably “loss leaders” to get people interested in the organization.

It’s the political and other aspects of UWP that bother me more than whether somebody’s making a buck off it.

4

Since this is about a musical group, let’s move it over to Cafe Society.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

5

I remember them showing up on TV occasionally in the 70s. I remember one of their songs had this refrain:
Up, up, with people. You meet 'me wherever you go.
Up, up with people. There the best kind of folks we know.
Or something like that.
ETA: Didn’t know they had started that early (1965) or that they continued that long.

6

They came and performed at a couple of the schools where I’ve taught. My students always seemed rather creeped out by them.

7

They came to my elementary school in the 80s.

I remember we thought it was kind of hokey but fun.

8

The late, lamented show *Popular *had an episode where Mary Cherry is outed as a former Up with People! singer. I remember them as being so aggressively wholesome they made the Osmonds look like the cast of Pink Flamingos.

9

I have some familiarity with them… we hosted a couple of tour members last year and my daughter went to their summer camp.

IIRC, the one-semester program is around 14k and the one-year program is around 18k. This includes four or six international trips per semester, and the member pays for the initial ticket (home city to Denver) and the last ticket (last tour stop to home). For example, the Spring 2011 “cast” had the following itinerary, according to their website:

Denver, CO
Orlando, FL
Vero Beach, FL
Freeport, Grand Bahama Island
Fort Lauderdale, FL
Lakeland, FL
Brussels, Belgium
Wassenaar, The Netherlands
Dronten, The Netherlands
Prague, Czech Republic
Weinfelden, Switzerland
México City, México
Gómez Palacio, Durango, México
Ciudad Cuauhtémoc, Chihuahua – México
Monterrey, Nuevo León – México
León, Guanajuato – México
Toluca, Estado de México – México

I don’t know what percentage of the fee goes to administrative expenses or “profit”, but transportation seems to account for a large part of the cost. Once you make it to Denver, you don’t pay anything out of pocket. The housing and regular meals are provided by volunteer host families, and special meals are provided by business sponsors. The focus is on community service, leadership/self-esteem, and performance. While in my city in Mexico the group spent a day painting a public children’s hospital and another day at a shelter for battered women, in addition to rehearsing and performing and public improv stuff.

There’s a lot of team- and character-building and group development, so “graduates” maintain a fraternal identity and supposedly help each other out throughout their lifetimes. I did ask our visitors about the Rearmament affiliation and they said that the group today has nothing to do with them, or any other past incarnation under the program name for that matter. At least to me, they viewed the anti-hippie phase as a deviation that has been corrected. One girl was a sort of saccharine cheery Yay World type, and the other girl was a Leaving a Broken Home, Fresh Start type.

My daughter says that there was no discussion at all at camp about religion, politics, social issues or anything else that might be construed as indoctrination or a litmus test for future members. The camp director was Buddhist, FWIW.

Participants can also get university credit, so some do it as a year-abroad humanities or arts program. The show itself is entertaining, like a well-done high school revue I suppose. Great production values, fair performing values, everyone looks like they’re having fun.

10

During that era, they also performed the Super Bowl halftime show…three times! ('76, '80, and '82)

11

After the group played at our high school, a friend of mine joined and toured with them for a while. If it would have cost ANY money at all, she would not have been able to participate.

I graduated HS in 1971.
~VOW

12

They came to my school around '71 or '72 when I was in 5th grade. I remember finding them creepy. if I had known the word “cultish”, I might have applied it in that case. We had to talk to them as well as watch their show.

13

I was with the group in the early 80s. I’m not sure where the cult thing comes from. We weren’t told to talk the same or dress the same or think the same. Well, we dressed the same in the show – but that was called a costume. :slight_smile: We weren’t being exploited for the sake of some control freak who wanted eternal fame. We came from a zillion different religious and political backgrounds. I still have 100 friends around the world – and yeah, that part about us helping each other out throughout our lifetimes is true. A guy from my cast (that’s what we called the groups, cuz we performed a show) had been suffering from kidney failure for several years and my cast pulled together to try to help him find a donor. That’s the most extreme example – we also just help each other out on a more mundane basis too.

I paid a little over $5,000 to travel for an entire year back in the 80s. We covered the entire East Coast and the South in the U.S., plus Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and Germany. We performed in huge auditoriums, schools, prisons and nursing homes. We sang the national anthem at the Daytona 500, and we played with kids at a Head Start program in Mississippi. We performed for the king and queen of Spain, and we flea-dipped dogs at a humane society shelter in Georgia.

Tuition fees covered about 1/3 of the overall expenses back then – the rest was raised through donors, show revenue and merchandise sales. Ticket revenue often went to a sponsor in the city, or just covered rental of the performance facility. The “new” UWP (restarted in 2006) is more expensive, but basically in line with other study abroad programs. With a whole lot more destinations (the current cast will be going to the U.S. Southwest, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Mexico).

Pretty much the only thing weird about the whole thing was the kind of people it attracted. Because, face it, an entire group of enthusiastic, optimistic, outgoing young adults is unusual enough that it does tend to creep people out. Which is really too bad.

Oh, and we performed the Super Bowl halftime four times, not three. :slight_smile:

14

NB: I said people called MRA a cult, and UWP was affiliated with them, but not necessarily a cult itself. Although it could be, I dunno.

Glenn Close was a member of both when she was a kid. She has called MRA a cult, not sure about UWP.

15

Moral Re-Armament also started a short-lived college, Mackinac College on Mackinac island in Michigan. Many of the students didn’t know they were going to a conservative Christian college and they went on strike when they found out.

16

I stand corrected. The final time (which I missed in my original enumeration) was Super Bowl XX, in 1986.

17

I’ll let you paint my house for $300. And for an extra fifty bucks I’ll let you sing.

(Tom Sawyer lives!)

18

Well, let’s see … for $5,000 I traveled for a whole year throughout the U.S. and Europe. So for $300 … unless your house is in St. Lucia, I think I’ll pass!

19

Wow, the only reason I am aware that Up With People even exists is because of a throwaway gag in an old episode of Night Court where Mac refers to a militant splinter faction of the group taking some hostages.

20

Now I have the Up With People theme song in my head. I have a good memory for songs, and that’s a catchy one.

I was an exchange student in 89-90 and my host family hosted two UWP girls when the show came to town. The place was packed and everyone seemed to enjoy it–the two girls were really fun, nice people.