education

Fame, I’m gonna live for ever!

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I’d like to speak to the manager!!!

Thirty years ago, I taught lighting D]design at the Cincinnati School for Creative and Performing Arts.  I started there in the fall of 1995 and left at the end of the 1998 school year.  

I learned more from my students and co-workers than I ever dreamed about teaching.  That being said, it was a great experience and I value the friendships of the people I met during that three-year period of my life. 

It was an interesting time to be there, as the school was going through a transition.  The founders of the school had just left, for an array of different reasons, and a new principal, artistic director and slew of teachers were being brought in.  

Myself, and the scenery design teacher both started at the same time.  We were tossed into the fire together, and both worked to make the program the best it could be.  He is still doing a great job there, by the way.  

I can’t speak to things now, but in 1995, I spent the morning teaching 7th and 8th graders intro to lighting.  And I spent the afternoon teaching 9th – 12th graders lighting design.  Everything from how to change a lamp in a lighting instrument and how to hang a light, then to how to create a design and implement it.  

As I said, we taught each other a lot.  

The thing I found most interesting was that while we were a performing arts high school, not everyone embraced this fact.  I remember going to the 12th grade English teacher to propose a combined unit on Macbeth, where we taught in tandem her focusing on the literary importance and me on the design components.  I was emphatically told no.  

Our principal at the time was also a piece of work.  I don’t remember the year, but myself and the scenery design teacher came to work one morning to find that the principal had ordered the custodians to empty the prop room.  To her it was a disorganized mess, and she felt it looked badly on her.  When we got there that morning all the props from storage were in the dumpster. 

I kid you not.  

With out asking we salvaged what we thought was important.

I discovered a set of mid-century dishes in the trash.  Franciscan Starburst Stoneware.  With the help of my students, we pulled it out of the trash and I took it home with me.  It was the start of a life time of collecting Franciscan stoneware.  

Fun fact about the Starburst pattern, 30 years later it would be worth hundreds of dollars.  It’s a serious collector’s item as we moved in the 21st century.  I still have those dishes, and have supplemented them when I have found them in various antique stores along the way.  

Adam and I use our Franciscan dishware all the time.  For all the major holidays.  Our cat’s food bowls are starburst and Ferndel dishes.  His mother gave us her wedding dishware which was the Desert Rose Franciscan pattern .  And we bought Indian Summer dishes 13 years ago.  

I have a friend whose mother gave him a complete 10 piece place setting array of Starburst dishware.  On eBay it would easily be worth several thousand dollars.  He jokes that it’s his retirement plan.  

For us, it’s our daily lives.  It goes in the dishwasher.  It’s durable.  And we love it.  

The best part of the principal cleaning out the prop room, was that I claimed it as my office for a year.  It had a loft and tons of book shelves.  For my students it was  a kind of  clubhouse for a year.  Complete with a sofa, a lava lamp that a student eventually broke. (It’s hard to clean up the liquid from a lava lamp) and hours of bonding with kids who needed a grown up to pay attention to them.  

My students have followed different paths.  It’s crazy to think they are in the late 40’s now.  And I’m proud to say, several went on to be successful theater professionals. 

I will never know how I affected their lives, but for those reading this, you changed my life for good, to quote Wicked.  

At the shrine of friendship, never say die. Let the wine of friendship never run dry

/ fightmasterwrites / Leave a comment

I’d like to speak to the manager!!!

I wrote the body of this post in May of 2021. It was only posted on Facebook. I’ve been trying to find it for a year now, and it finally popped up in my memories.

About three months before my writing career really kicked off, I’d just opened a new restaurant, something I’m on the fence about ever doing again.

We opened about 10 days before the mask mandate was lifted, along with the need for spacing tables for safety.

In fact, someone called the police on us because they felt that we were seating people too close. Life in the time of Covid.

The opening was a success.

We went from 0 to 100 in about 14 days. Business couldn’t have been better. We were short staffed. I only had one manager, me. And it was a zoo. But we were making money, and that was what counted.

Now for the post from 2021.

My new restaurant just finished week three.

It’s a very big success and we are doing quite well. Through continuous conversations with guests, it often comes up that I moved from NYC, and in a previous life I was a theatrical lighting designer.

A pretty good one at that.

I’m often asked how I got from designing lights to restaurant manager.

Well.

Fun fact.

In grad school, while obtaining my MFA at the University of California, San Diego, one of the best theatre schools in the country, I ran a very successful bar out of my office.

I hosted happy hour every Friday for two years, from 4:00 to close.

Which was sometimes 5:00. But more often 1:00 or 2:00 am. And at least a couple of times, the sun was coming up when we all wrapped up the evening.

I’d often open up for days that were stressful, when we needed a little boost to get through the long days and nights. My mentor Chris Parry, would sneak down on Tuesdays and ask for a gin and tonic.

My regulars included classmates, and unofficially our staff and professors who always pretended they weren’t there. Including the chair of the program.

We also had alumni, guest artists, friends, and strangers.

The crowd could be two people if everyone was in rehearsal.

Sometimes it didn’t even include me if I was teching a show.

Sometimes there might be 30 plus people.

We also had glass bar ware and nothing but top shelf booze.

Bombay Sapphire was our gin of choice. Just ask Sarah EC Maines?

We were also known to deliver at least once during tech. Usually during a 10 out of 12. (A 10 out 12 is when you rehearse a show, with the entire team, including actors for 10 hours in a 12 hour block of time).

We’d take orders and bring all the designers and stage managers their favorites.

It’s also because of these deliveries I now drink bourbon. I got sick during tech for my thesis show, and my classmates kept my Diet Coke cup spiked with bourbon as I couldn’t talk and felt like shit. It got me through 8 days of tech and the show looked great.

I also managed to keep the inventory stocked and the fridge full by charging just two dollars per drink. We had an honor system and house accounts for those of us who ran short at the end of the month.

I was a just as proud of doing this as I was the design work I produced while a student.

When I graduated, my cocktail hour was as much a part of my legacy as my design work.

On the day of graduation, I had a cooler stashed off stage. There were about 25 people who graduated in the department graduation. As we were presented our fake diplomas, we were offered the chance to say a few words.

As long as we kept it short.

I started my speech by saying that I’d spent countless hours, and thousands of dollars to be here today, so I’m going to go a little over my time limit. I spoke for about 15 minutes with bullet points on a piece of paper. This was before I-phones so there is no recording, but I was told it was a good speech.

At the beginning of the speech, my friends Tom and Anjee, pulled the cooler out, and together, we distributed Coronas to all the graduates and professors.

At the end of my speech, I popped the top off my own Corona and toasted the team. I was nearly in tears when I finished.

I miss doing design work.

But I like my life in Maine more.

I’ve said a million times that my studies in California made me the person I am today.

My patience.

My ability to see the big picture.

My ability to deal with different types of people.

My ability to know just how much to dim the lights for dinner. And explaining to owners that they indeed needed to spend money on lights that produced amber light AND NOT fluorescent white light.

My ability to not to stab someone in the eye with a fork.

My ability to train new staff.

All of this is an extension of UCSD.

While I haven’t designed lights in a hot minute, my three years were life changing.

So, a big shout out to Mark Maltby for not shutting me down!

And know that I’m forever grateful for my time in California.

And that’s how I went from being a lighting designer to being a general manager.

I posted this, three years ago, and got a few comments. I want to include it in my archives, so that when I write my book it can be included.

And.

I am doing a show in a week. The first since 2014. Small. But I’ll write about that separately.

So that’s five miso soup, four seaweed salad, three soy burger dinner, two tofu dog platter, and one pasta with meatless balls

/ fightmasterwrites / Leave a comment

I’d like to speak to the manager!!!

When last you tuned in, I was just leaving J.C. Penney after meeting the Hallmark card guy, when he came to stock greeting cards.

Fun fact, I stayed friends with both the card guy and his boyfriend for a while afterwards. They ended making hand crafted furniture with no modern fasteners in their one-bedroom apartment. I visited them several times and they lived in the living room and assembled furniture in the bedroom. They had a full workshop including a table saw, band saw, and a lathe. They’d work from 9 to 5 building furniture to abide by the building’s quiet time restrictions.

Meanwhile…

I was hired to work at Bennigan’s by a woman who I remember being called Kim. It might be Sally for all I remember. She interviewed me at a high top in front of the bar.

I started 10 days later.

She was gone by the time I had my first day. (This happened a lot to me as I moved from job to job. I’d be hired by someone, who was gone by the time I started if not shortly after).

The manager was replaced by a woman named Karen.

The management team was awesome. A guy named Dana who was very, very good looking and who played baseball in college. He was eventually replaced by a man named John, who although not as cute, was very, very sweet.

My whole experience at Bennigan’s was awesome until the dastardly Keith appeared one day….but we’ll get to him.

I started on a Monday at 1:00. We did all the requisite tours and forms. Then myself, along with my other co-hires and a man named Jimmy all sat down for classroom training.

Jimmy was very gay. Very funny. Laughed uproariously. Only worked days. And was awesome.

He died a few years after I left Atlanta from an aneurism. I remember being stunned by the news.

He was the official classroom trainer. And he spent the next five days teaching us all things serving.

I value those five days I spent in classroom training, more than any other training I’ve gotten in my life.

Those five days allowed me to be very good at making a living until my mid-40’s.

Every day, during those classroom hours we were taught to wait tables.

I wish that I’d saved my employee manual, because it would come in handy, even today.

They assumed we all had experience, but they trained us as if we didn’t.

We were taught:

How to hold a tray.

How to bus a table.

How to take an order.

The different kinds of liquors and what they were served with.

How to garnish a drink.

How to carry three plates.

How to carry four glasses.

How to empty an ashtray.

My favorite. What does 86’d mean?

It means to be out of something.

I remember thinking that it must be because it’s 1987 and to not have something would have been so last year. True story.

We had hand written tickets and there was a detailed abbreviation system.

You had to remember the difference between broccoli bites and broccoli soup, when writing the tickets

You had to know the difference between broccoli bites and burger bites.

One was brocc.

One was bites.

The bar was tricky as I knew nothing.

An arrow up for straight up.

An “X” for on the rocks.

What the hell was a martini?

I used those abbreviations taking orders until May 24, 2012, when I took my last order.

After 4 hours of classroom training, we were given an apron and assigned to a grown-up waiter.

I was trained by a man named David for at least two of my shifts. He was a great server, who was excellent at his job.

He was also sarcastic, with a biting sense of humor and he took a liking to me from the get go.

He taught me to combine my steps.

He taught me that you are only in the weeds if you think you are.

He taught me to never let them see you sweat.

He taught me to never show weakness.

And he taught me how to have a good time, by showing me how to walk through the dining room like a super model.

At the end of the that week of training, I graduated and became a full-fledged server.

I was good at it from the start. And I do say so myself. I don’t think I’ve ever been better at anything in my life.

It wasn’t long before I tasked with waiting on the corporate team.

I was a trainer.

I was on the employee council.

I was an office assistant.

And I was always in the same section, in the smoking section and it was far busier than the other side of the restaurant.

This job truly served me well.

I’ll also brag that it was the last time I ever finished training as a server. From that point on, I would train two or three days, pass the test, and be on the floor.

It was the beginning of November when I started.

I’d be straight for 6 more weeks.