Unfortunately I was not called for the crew and ended up just buying a ticket and going to the show anyway.
There is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert.
In the spring of my first year at Michigan I was called, twice, to help on The New Barbarians concert, a benefit tour put together by Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones as part of his plea deal for a drug bust.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Barbarians_(band)
Ann Arbor was to be the first night of the American part of the tour and they were expecting many trucks with equipment from all over the country to arrive with the various guest artists for this all-star band and really needed a big crew.
As fate would have it I had a final exam in a Psychology class early the next morning and there was no way I could work the concert and expect to be ready for the test.
The course was called Perception and was about how our body’s senses work and react to things like color and light, and I still use some of what I learned back then when I teach today, so maybe it was a good idea that I did not work that concert.
I really gave it some thought, but I had to pass on what could have been a very exciting event.
Although disappointed in missing these two events I still had plenty of other productions to work on in addition to the regular department productions.I worked on a re-mounting a production of Carmina Burana by Carl Orff, a music/dance event that had been staged before I got to Michigan and I also got design lighting in the Power Center one more time when I was asked to do the lighting for a joint concert of the Wisconsin Singers and Michigan’s Amazin’ Blue, a “Wild” concert of college Glee clubs.
My lighting design teacher asked me to serve as his assistant for a tour of two dance faculty to the Interlochen Arts Academy in northern Michigan.
http://academy.interlochen.org/
It was a nice trip and I ended up being the stage manager, master electrician in addition to being the assistant to the lighting designer.
Interlochen is a wonderful place, isolated, but even in the middle of the winter it was a very beautiful and peaceful place to be.
Because Interlochen is a high school and not a college, the local town was pretty quiet and did not offer too many options but our first night there the four of us went out to a local bar and had a good time even though we knew that everyone in the bar was looking at us.
The staff treated us very well and had a nice reception/party for us after the show.
Odd memory: it was on the drive up to Interlochen that I remember seeing my first salad bar in a restaurant, although common today, it was still a new idea back then.
Later in the spring I would return to Interlochen as the lighting designer for a tour of the Michigan Dance Ensemble.
I drove up the day before the concert with my assistant, an undergraduate design major, and worked to ready the theatre for the concert.
It was nice to see Interlochen in the spring and it was a welcome getaway just before the craziness of my last few months at Michigan as I finished up my MFA Thesis.
Evidently there had been some incident involving a student and teacher during the time between my visits and there were no students are the party for the dancers after the show this time.
Of course Theatre is a small world and I would run into the woman who was the Technical Director at Interlochen about 10 years later.
I was on a search committee for the Dance Department at Brockport and she was a finalist for the job.
Also I know that Susan, the girl who was my assistant back then, has been working as a company manager on various Dance and Theatre tours over the last 30 years and about twenty years ago I saw her name in the New York Times as part of an article reporting on the stupid and dangerous things that construction workers in the city do.
The idiots were doing things like throwing the lids of 5 gallon pails off of buildings like Frisbees into the people and street below.
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