theatre

I’m calm, I’m calm, I’m perfectly calm!

/ fightmasterwrites / Leave a comment

I’d like to speak to the manager!!!

Gay Pride Edition!

Our queer little show closed tonight.

In case you weren’t paying attention, it’s a group of lesbians, who perform skits and songs as drag kings. I’ve had a couple of friends say they were expecting a something along the lines of a drag queen show. This isn’t anything like that.

It’s a full two-hour show. Filled with scenes about irreverent things that we shouldn’t find funny but we do. Think Book of Mormon with drag queens. They walk right up to the line, but never cross it. In fact, we have lots of discussions about whether it’s cool to say or do things. Conversations about consent, audience response, and whether it’s funny or just crude. Sometimes it’s both.

This show, also had two dance groups with us. Friends of the family so to speak. It was a lot of fun, lighting their pieces as I haven’t lit dance in a long time. I was able to do a lot with the 60 or so instruments in the air. I got lucky with the plot from the last group, as we don’t hang and move very little. We change some color and hope for the best.

Tonight’s performance was a little tricky for me.

I started to have a panic attack just as the show started.

For absolutely no reason.

My heart was racing. My hands were shaking. I was a little out of it.

It’s tricky to push buttons on a light board with your left hand, when it already shakes. Oh, and I’m right handed, but that hand was running sound. Add to that, the effects of a panic attack and my hand was insane. So insane that at the end of the first number I hit the go button twice. I was ahead a cue. Then I went back. Then I tried to figure out where we were with the scene change, and as I’m doing that, the curtain opens with work light. Then I hit the button again, and did it twice again. Finally, we were in the right cue, at the right place, and the rest of the light cues for the act were better than ever. But my heart was till racing.

The light cues were correct.

But I get the video ready to play for the end of the act number, hit play and the video starts. It has about 30 seconds of black with just music. I undouse at the end the 30 seconds and there is no video. And I have no idea why it’s not playing. The person on stage is supposed to be lit by the video. She is in static. The music is playing. I’m sitting there hyperventilating.

Finally, about 90 seconds into it, I fade the music. Bring up the house lights and say, motherfucker!!!

One of the kings comes up to the booth, and we hit play and motherfucker, it worked just like it should have. There was absolutely nothing that I did wrong.

We ended up showing the video at the beginning of Act 2, which I think worked better.

The audience was very forgiving, my friends were very forgiving. Adam came up at intermission and gave me a hug. Then the stage manager came up and gave me a hug. The kings gave me a hug.

The anxiety was gone. Act 2 went off without a hitch.

After the show, much of the cast and friends gathered outside the theater before we moved on to the cast party. A very dear woman come up to me and said are you Jeff? I said that I was, and she began to thank me for my work on the show, telling me how much she loved the direction and the lighting. I thanked her profusely, but to be honest, I was embarrassed. In all my days lighting shows, no one has ever approached me that enthusiastically about my work. A complete stranger at that.

By the time I got the cast party, just like in high school, except all the gays, lesbians, and trans folks were out of the closet, and there was booze. Lots and lots of booze, I felt great.

It felt good.

So good that I told them all that we should go ahead and book the theater for November. Let’s do an election day show, the weekend before.

Let’s see if I can convince them of this.

I do hope it’s not another 9 years.

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.