OOC # 39
I tend to skip most of the employee parties these days. They're geared to be entertaining for 14-18 year-olds, and I was long past that when I started at the park. This is one of the few things they do that I actually look forward to.
I'm sure, had I said anything about "I'm going to the bowling party", there would have been some concerned words about priorities...but when push comes to shove and the chips are down, I'm there for the long haul. Anyone who wants to complain about me leaving early, now, to go to an employee party, needs to come talk to me after lighting focus, when it's one AM and there's me, Security, and the grounds clean-up guys on the park, and that's it. Since they're all home in bed whenever we're doing that, I don't feel bad about giving up an afternoon when we're still a couple of weeks out from starting rehearsals, especially when all of the major projects on my list are things that I can't do until electricians and carpenters are done putting our space back together. Or today, when I was the one in the basket lift, almost twenty feet above the stage, balancing on the bars on the side of the basket (which we're not supposed to do...don't tell anyone...) because there's already so much crap hanging above the stage that I can't get the basket close enough to where I need to be to mount the anchor points for yet more stuff that's going to be hung (and could potentially make it impossible for us to get down a couple of our lights...that will be fun...)
I took advantage of the time that I was up there to strip out some of the old rigging (some of it, I had to, because it was in the way of what I was putting up), even though the last time we used it (five or six years ago), when I asked if I should take it down because we were unlikely to use it again and if we did, there would probably be better places to rig it, the director said, "No...we should leave it there. Just in case..." You get up to the grid over the stage (where we're hanging all the lights), and there's an absolutely revolting amount of, "No, leave it there...just in case..." Half of it, we can't even use now, because so much other stuff has been hung underneath it that we can't even get to it anymore. I understand the whole "we went to a lot of trouble to get that installed, and we could end up using it again, so keep it there" (I mean, I'm the king of "Don't throw that away, that could be really useful under the right circumstances!") But when you have to move it around EVERY YEAR to get it out of the way of what you ARE using, and you haven't used it in almost a decade, and it could be EASILY rigged to be reinstalled if you decided to use it...WHY IS IT STILL THERE?!!!
Yeah, I was a little frustrated today. It got even better when they wanted to use the basket lift to raise the subwoofers (the 'more crap' that I was rigging hanging points for) up into position, and I had to explain that I could barely get MYSELF in there. Throw a 4x3x3 ft box up on the edge of the basket so I can't see where I'm going and there's even LESS room to maneuver, and I seriously doubt I can do that. If the other speakers weren't already in the way...if I didn't have to dodge the antique-ish sconce lights (with legitimately antique glassware in them)...if they would get me trained on the other lift that fits in the theater--the one with an articulated arm on the end of the boom so I could get closer to the ceiling without worrying about crushing part of the main support beam around the outside of the theater...
If they would stop layering band-aid fixes on top of band-aid fixes...
But, the rigging work is almost all done. We have one in position to be hoisted up, we have pulleys and ropes rigged, we have a maintenance crew that's supposed to show up to help us hoist it tomorrow morning (we tried it tonight, and there just weren't enough of us to make it work)...so, hopefully, by noon tomorrow, it will all be done.
That was part one of the good news. Part two is, the kids did so well at rehearsal last night that the director/theatre teacher decided they didn't need to rehearse tonight, which would send them into opening night tomorrow all rested up (hopefully! We ARE talking about high school kids, after all, and that's an age group that isn't well known for wise decision making.) But I didn't end up sitting in a darkened theater tonight and almost falling asleep (again). Didn't really get rest, but I did get to run a few errands for the things I was going to fix tonight and can now fix tomorrow night instead.
But I did have to deal with the group that rented our large screen for the late (9pm) time-slot tonight. A realty group, sponsored by a realtor who specializes in buying flipped houses and then reselling them, and a bunch of the people who either flip the houses or provide services for those flipping the houses. They were WAY more interested in talking to each other than watching a movie, and a handful of them only lasted maybe five minutes inside the theater and then came out and spent the rest of the night talking in the lobby. I didn't realize how much I enjoy the solitude of a quiet lobby until they left...