Like any other high school, Danny Hand puts on plays. One in the fall, and a musical in the spring. Adam Nuz and I are both in stage crew building the set, and we've been working together on...hm.....well....what have we done? Oh ya, Ms. Littel (The woman in charge of the stage crew) told us to built a makeshift bench out of 2x4s that somehow turned into a prop radiator....and a doorstop. That's what 15 hours of work (and a great amount of bloodshed) produced. Murphy's Laws state that nothing will work the first time, right? Boy did we find that out. We also found out nothing will work out the second time. (I can't tell you how many attempts at that doorstop I made...)
BUT ANYWAY, the set is built and the play is being preformed. The play for this semester is "Up the Down Staircase." It's about a new teacher who teaches at an inner city school and she winds up helping all the students and they all get along in the end yadda yadda.. (There's no staircase in the entire play, so that name is a little... irrelevant,) So, this is a great big performance, and Ms. Littel left us in charge of the left spotlight. Maybe not one of her best decisions, but oh well.
There are fold up seats in the auditorium where we preform, so Nuz and I had to schlep the forty pound Marsha (The spotlight, yes, the spotlight has a name, you'd be better off not asking) up twenty feet to the top back of the bleachers. For the duration of the play, he's positioned himself in the most uncomfortable position to handle Marsha; sitting on the backs of the chairs. I'm sitting next to him with a walkie-talkie with a light to help me read the script and tell Nuz his cues to shine the light. It's a simple task, and not all to hard. There's not much to do, so therefore not much to mess up, but we'll see what we can do...
Littel also calls on the radio if we're not doing something right.....so she's frequently communicating with us.
Nuz and I are up there in our taped off little corner of hell (Cause it's so hot, and Marsha just vents out heat) in the bleachers chowing down out on Oreos, Swedish fish, Tootsie Rolls, popcorn, and whatever else. By the end of the play, it's one heck of a mess. Wrappers, cans, bottles, and the script are sporadically thrown about. It's amazing how much garbage two guys can accumulate. And did I mention that we also eat our entire dinners up there, because that just adds to the pile of trash...
Four missed cues later, the play is over. The cast bow, and point to the center where the sound crew is set up, and Nuz shines the light down at them.....the only issue is that when there's a standing ovation, we get blinded by the light reflecting off of someone's chrome dome. Then, they point up to us at the spot light, and Nuz preforms his patented figure eight across the ceiling.
There's this reoccurring theme with me being in crew....I have no clue what I'm doing. I just do what Littel tells me to do, build whatever, rebuild whatever, and not ask any questions. It was only until a week before the performance that I figured out why we needed a bench/radiator.
As far as a play goes, it's not the best, as far as spotlights, anything but the best, and as far as acting, incredible. The cast put together and incredible show, and congratulations to them.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go build some odd thing for the musical coming up this spring
And p.s, after all the rehearsals and performances, I can just about recite the entire play word for word.
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