Krazy Jim's Blimpy Burger

The lease for my first apartment in Ann Arbor ended in May so I needed to sublet a place to live for the summer.
I found a place just south of the campus near the Student Union.
It was a little further to walk but I would suffer as I got to live with three women and one guy who spent most of his time at his girlfriend’s place.

They guy I sublet my room from had several large fish tanks and did not want to move them and asked me if I would feed them over the summer as none of the girls would do it.
The biggest tank had just a few fish including one large Jack Dempsey (Rocio Octofasciata for those who care).

The fish looked cool and was very aggressive.
It would bite onto anything you put in the tank, like the end of a pencil and your fingers should not to go near the fish.

I did not see any fish food and asked what I was to feed it.
The guy just pointed to the other fish tank that was full of goldfish.
Every day or so I was to catch one of the goldfish and drop it in the tank with the Jack Dempsey.
It would be gone in a flash.
Occasionally one of the goldfish might last a few seconds to swim around but soon would be gone.

It was a quiet place and I enjoyed living there and did not mind when the girls would sunbathe on the roof right outside of my window.
This was still a time before microwaves were in every kitchen and our most modern appliance was a toaster oven that one of the girls used to make burnt cheese.
She would just put some cheese on some tinfoil and crisp it up.
It seemed odd to me at the time until I realized that it was the burnt cheese part of real baked macaroni and cheese that I liked best.

They invited me back to the house in the fall for a 60’s party.
Peace

Just down the street from my house was what quickly became my favorite restaurant in Ann Arbor; Krazy Jim's Blimpy Burger

http://www.blimpyburger.com/

I was surprised to see Guy Fieri do a feature on it during Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives on the Food Network.
You can see the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVTcAkfuRFw

I was glad to see that it still there, with some of the same staff, and that it does not seem to have changed too much in 30 years, but there is little on the menu that I would eat these days.
If you watch the video you will see the same lady working the grill who was there when I was used to eat there back in 1979.

At the end of the summer the Theatre Grad Students had a big party to celebrate those graduating and also to make fun of ourselves.
Gag gifts were made for everyone, many in bad taste and some flat out rude.
I do not know what the girl who got the “Round, Round, I get Around Award” thought about it but I got a flashlight with a little color wheel attached to it.
Guess I talked about working at Lycian Stage Lighting too much, but hey it was just the previous summer which seemed ages ago after the crazy first year at Michigan.

I moved into my third and final apartment at the end of the summer and was ready for my second year at Michigan and all of its work and new adventures still ahead.

The Van Buren Lighting Board

As I noted in an earlier post, in the summer of 1979 I designed the lighting for Ah, Wilderness by Eugene O’Neill and Hay Fever by Noel Coward as part of the Michigan Summer Repertory.
There were two other plays, but both of my productions opened on the same day, one at 2:00 PM and the other at 8:00 PM.
This is the only time that I had two plays opening on the same day and needless to say it was a bit crazy, both plays looked good and everything came off well.
There were changeovers of the sets and lights between each of the four plays that took several hours and everyone in the company worked very hard to get it all done.
As the Master Electrician part of my job was to re-patch the lights.

The lighting control board was an early computer board made by Van Buren and there is a description of the lighting board that was in use in the Power Center for the Performing Arts in the 1970’s is in Linda Essig’s 2002 book, The Speed of Light: Dialogues on Lighting Design and Technological Change.

http://www.amazon.com/Speed-Light-Dialogues-Lighting-Technological/dp/0325005087

I would recommend this book to anyone interested the big changes that stage lighting has gone through over the past 25 years, with discussions from the early computer control boards through what is in use today.

The lighting system in the Power Center was State-of-the-Art back in the 1970’s and had many quirks.
It was one of the first computer control boards, if not the first, was prone to overheating as well as dropping its memory.
The system used a slider patch panel that was up on the mid-level loading floor of the fly system on stage right.
Each of the several hundred circuits needed to be moved to their new assignments in one of the 57 dimmers before each show.
Sometimes the sliders would not click in tight to make a good connection or they would be in the wrong slot so it was important to do a dimmer check after each re-patch as there would always be a few sliders that needed to be adjusted during each change over.

As much work and fun that I had my first year there was to be even more adventures in store for me during my second year at Michigan.
Once or twice during my first year I made a few extra dollars by working as a theatre supervisor when an outside an group rented one of the department’s performance spaces but in my second year I worked on more Theatre, Music and Dance productions as well as several union calls working as a stagehand on several touring professional theatre productions and Rock & Roll shows.
Working with the local stagehands union was good experience, lots of fun and paid more money.

One thing that was omnipresent during my entire time at Michigan was the fact that I would have to produce a Master’s Thesis by the end of my second year.
During my first year I saw how hard the second year MFA’s worked on their Thesis’ and how much time that they put into it.
The first and most difficult task of my Thesis was the selection of the play that I would use.

I would need to design the sets, lights and costumes for the play; producing all of drawings, draftings, renderings and related paperwork as well as writing a paper that tied it all together.
There was no restriction and few guidelines given to us, just pick a play that you like and that you can work on for the next nine to ten months.
Oh course I wanted to pick a play that would be fit all the requirements but I also wanted it to be changeling, but not too crazy or with problems that would make it impossible to get it all done.

Early in my second year at Michigan I started the process of selecting a play.
I went through all of the plays I knew and quickly threw out Shakespeare; and not because the plays are difficult, but because many other MFA students had recently used his plays and I did not want my work compared to what they had just done.
When I took a Shakespeare class back at UB the teacher had us read many other non-Shakespeare plays of the pre-Elizabethan era in order to give us a better understanding of Shakespeare’s plays.
We read such plays as Everyman, Ralph Roister Doister, Gammer Gurton’s Needle and Gorbuduc and then we read the plays of Kyd, Marlowe, Johson and finally on to Shakespeare himself.
I found this very helpful being able understanding the plays as well as reading them with ease as we progressed from blank verse to Shakespeare’s Iambic Pentamer.

I liked both Marlowe’s plays and his mysterious life and death life; I would have chosen The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus except for the fact that someone had just used it for their Thesis two year before.
My second choice, and the play that I selected, was Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, a play that I really liked when I first read it and I enjoyed working on it.

During the course of my second year there were periodic meetings with the Thesis Committee to report on the progress of the work that I was doing.
Research into the play and playwright, basic design research and preliminary design work all had to be done and approved before the final work would begin during my last summer at Michigan.
More about my Thesis will follow in upcoming blogs.

There was also plenty of other design and class work that I would do my second year beginning with designing the lighting for the first guest artist series production in the Power Center in the fall of 1979.
I had just designed two productions in the summer rep, but those designs were part of a basic rep plot, but now I only had to deal with the one production and could hang whatever lights and specials that were needed for the production.

A few more thoughts about my Blog

As I have written about my adventures over this past year, it has been hard for me not to always say “This was the best time of my life”!
Well working in Theatre has been the best time of my life.
Each production whether they were large or small, offered interesting problems and challenges that were fun to figure out.
As I think back to my time in grad school (about which I have been most recently writing in my blog) we had a dozen or more talented grad students working together on the productions along with the teachers and undergrad students, it seemed to me at the time that we were doing great work, having a great time and that we were unstoppable.

I thought the shows were all great and that we were doing the best Theatre ever done.
Well they were good, maybe not the best ever, but for me at the time it was a great experience.
I started to learn how to draft in High School, learned more in college but now I was using my skills to design things.
Things that I thought up and drew out on paper were being built in the shop and lights in the theatre set up and focused using my plans.
People were working on things that I designed, of course I felt great.

As I look back today to my work over the years I can be honest with myself, I know how things really were; I know what was really good, what was bad and what turned out so-so, but it was all special to me.

I have always known that I was lucky to come into the world of Theatre; to be able to stay there and make a living doing what I love.
Of course working on the big productions with lots of money, time and staff is fun; but I have also enjoyed getting the chance to work on smaller and more challenging shows in smaller theatres with limited resources.
Sometimes it is while working on small productions; working alone, wearing too many hats, complaining about the conditions, but still finding a way to get it done - is when I have found the greatest enjoyment.

Back in college and grad school I did not know where my career path would lead me but I was determined to enjoy the ride.
I never have worried too much about if I was working in the right or best theatre or school but have tried to make each production the best I could.
Not every play I have worked on has been a great success, but I have always tried to give my best to every production.

Since becoming a teacher I have enjoyed helping others start their own journey into the world of Theatre and I am happy and proud when I hear of the success of my former students.
As I write about my past adventures I do want my readers to think that I view them as my “Glory Days”, the best years of my life.
I would be nice to think that every moment of our lives are the special golden moments, the best days of our lives, and if you enjoy each moment as its comes and make the best of them you will be happy.

Yes I am proud of the work I have I done, I did enjoy them working on them all, but it is the current play, that always the most important production to me.
I have been asked many times if I am sad on closing night, when I have to take a set down, and my answer is always the same; No.
It is the journey; the research, the designing, calculating and building of each show that I enjoy.
When a show is over it is time to move on to the next one and the start of a new adventure.

As I start the second year of my blog I hope to have more interesting stories to share with my readers as I go back and review what I have done, where I have been and where I still may be going.

My Blog, First Anniversary

One year ago I started writing my blog about my life working in Theatre and I have enjoyed the review of the journey that has taken me to where I am today.
I have only really covered about ten years on working on plays; high school, college and the first year of grad school and there is over thirty years of stories yet to come.
As I have written each blog I have had to stop and review my memories, look through old photos, programs and do some research on the internet and Facebook to find old friends and classmates to see what they have been doing.

It has been nice to reconnect with a few people I have not seen in many years, but the whole process of reviewing events from your life can sometimes leave me feeling a bit melancholy thinking about the days and people of the past.
You can drive yourself crazy if you worry too much about what you did or did not do in the past, it is perhaps best just to remember the good times, smile a bit to oneself and move on.

It is interesting to see where other’s journeys have taken them whether or not they have stayed working in Theatre or not.
An old college friend sent me an e-mail after he found my blog while looking for some information about a play we had worked on over thirty years ago.

I was surprised to find my blog linked from a major computer software site.
It was my book review for “Light Plot Deconstructed” by Gregg Hillmar that prompted me to start my blog in the first place after joking about writing a book for many years.
I needed an online place for my review and a blog seemed like an easy place to put it.
My review is linked from the Vectorworks website: http://delicious.com/VectorWorks/book-review+light-plot-deconstructed.

What started out as a whim turned out to be very enjoyable and I look forward to writing each new entry.
I do not know if the next thirty years of memories will have as much detail as the first ten, but I know that I still have many more tales to tell and hope to add new ones in the coming years.
I have been trying to follow a chronological order in my blog, but have jumped about from time to time, added some of my current adventures, repeated some stories and have jumped off topic and probably I will do it again.

As I have had time and have gone back and re-read my blog, I have found and corrected a few mistakes and I added a few things that I have remembered since I wrote the original blog entry.
I will have to do a complete re-write when I publish the whole blog as my tell-all autobiography after I retire.

A new school year is about to start, the building renovations are coming to an end, but there are still many major things that are not done as of this time.
Whatever building problems there still are they will just be added into the mix of a new academic year with new students and productions and we will all have to wait to see what new, and hopefully interesting, stories develop.

Summer 1979

At the end of each semester at The University of Michigan there was a portfolio review of all of your class and design work by all four of the design teachers.
The first review at the end of the fall semester was a bit scary as I did not know what to expect.
As I noted in an earlier post the faculty kicked one of the scene design students out of the MFA program and was only given a MA for the work already done.
At the review in the spring semester the only second year lighting design student was kicked out of the program.
He had too many prior problems and incompletes in his class work, but it might have been fact that he was very drunk when he fell down the aisle in the theatre on the opening night of the play he designed that was the final straw that finally gave him the boot.

Because there were no longer any second year lighting design students I was selected to be the master electrician for the Michigan Summer Repertory and got to design two of the four plays.
I had to work with the other two lighting designers to draft a master light plot that would work with all of the plays.

My Bio from the program

Three of to four plays worked well with the rep plot but the set for one of my plays was very different from the other three and did not work well and I had to fight with myself to make the lights work for that play.

I designed the lighting for Ah, Wilderness by Eugene O’Neill and Hay Fever by Noel Coward that summer.

Hay Fever

Because we were building four shows at the same time space was always an issue in the scene shop.

The scene designer for the Hay Fever set painted the flats in the small parking lot just outside the shop and of course someone drove over them leaving tire tracks.
At our end of the year party another of the designers made a tee shirt tire actual tire tracks painted on the shirt that said; Hay Fever, Park Here.

Ah, Wilderness

In addition to working on the four plays each summer we also had classes.

The classes were all special topics and sometimes taught by a guest instructor.
One of the classes was a curtain draping class in which we learned how to make and hang various curtain types and other classes were about making props and upholstering furniture.

The most important thing about the summer was that we got to take one day off a week to play softball.
The Theatre Department had two intramural teams, one all male and the other was coed.
It was very important to the general morale of everyone working in the shop as the few hours away helped us all keep sane with all the work being done.
I think we may have had more fun than any of the other teams, but we did not have much luck winning.
Many of the other teams had uniforms, took it all very seriously and had the average age of 19.
Our team with a mix of both grad students and teachers had an average age of 27 and were just there to have fun.
Over the two summers I think we only won one game and we felt bad that we hurt the other team’s chances in the playoffs.

We played a few bonus games against the local stagehands union, usually with a keg near home plate, that were also lots of fun.
I still have the baseball glove that I bought in Ann Arbor and take with me when I go to local AAA baseball games in Rochester.