In one of the many empty storefronts on Main Street, Mayor Ralph Becker announced the location of the Downtown Performance Center with great pomp.

Actually the DPC will go into another cobwebbed space in Salt Lake's ghost downtown — the abandoned printing facilities of The Tribune and DNews. (The printing operation and the Trib itself fled Main Street years ago, apparently to make room for wonderful things like Broadway theater productions.)

You can read and watch the financial/political details here and here.

I want to give those of you Joe Sixpacks who couldn't take off work to be there a feel for the drama of Ralph's grand announcement. First a group of amateur show people performed, I guess to give us an idea what the second-rate touring companies will sound like. The high point was a song and dance by KUTV's Rod Decker. Then Becker, as usual, electrified the crowd.

The mayor was followed by LDS Presiding Bishop H. David Burton who said it was a "chocolate-chip cookie day," which he explained is what he calls the good days in his life. Things must be hunkydory for the LDS church because the bish looks like he's been heavily into the Famous Amos.

Gov. Jon Huntsman confirmed his status as head geek and anti-matter to Sarah Palin, by telling a drollery about Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw exchanging one-liners. It goes like this, Shaw sent Churchill tickets to the opening of Pygmalion . . . ah forget it, you wouldn't get it anyway.

Then Lane Beattie took the stage. As Chamber president, Beattie is the gas-bag laureate of the state and he outdid himself. In a rollicking recap of Utah arts history, Laine recounted how in the early part of the 20th Century, the Legislature set up the first arts support group "in the world." (The first of the Lege's stabs at socialism.)

The governments of the Athenians, Napoleon and those crazy bread-and-circus Roman emperors never did anything for the arts.

John Ballard, president of New Space Entertainment, said he can't wait to drink his first glass of champagne in the lobby of the performance center. He had better run that by Brother Burton.