New job and new town, it all happened so fast.
With working on the hold-over show and teaching classes right on my first day I was in Brockport I had little time to settle down and learn the lay of the land and find out who was who.
During my interview in NYC the faculty who were there told me about the money problems with the State but also they said that the Scene Designer was a problem.
It seems that he was just a bit too odd for them.
Odd, of course he was odd, but so am I, so I thought, what the hack I would figure out a way to work with him.
So why was he odd?
Richard, the Scene Designer was from Manchester England, was very messy, smoked cigars, had a thick beard full of crumbs and you could barely understand what he was saying through his heavy Northern English accent.
OK, so what, I still would try.
As it turned out one of my undergraduate design teachers was English and I had just read an article about working with English designers in Theatre Crafts magazine.
In a nutshell it said that when the set design turns out bad it was the shops fault and when it turned out good the designer was a genius.
The biggest fault I found was that the other people did not try to talk with Richard.
I talked with him, asked him questions and just worked with him trying to give him what he wanted.
It seemed easy and we got along fine, and yes he was odd.
In less than a week the hold-over show was done and it was time to start working on the first play of the school year.
Richard liked to build models and did not really draft any plans, but that was fine with me.
I liked to draft and would draw whatever we needed after asking Richard some basic questions:
How tall do you want that?
Is that going to be painted or do you want real modeling?
One time I asked him for some drawings and he just broke the set model into pieces and Xeroxed it.
I liked it that I could get along with him when the others could not and he did get me work on a TV movie so that was nice, and I will have some fun stories from that in an upcoming blog.
I also had to learn about my other co-workers as well; who they were and how did they like to work.
On one of those first days a Brockport I was talking with the costume designer in the scene shop about all the tax and insurance forms that I had to sign when she said that she was a little sad because she would no longer have her son the claim on her taxes that year.
Wow, what happened I thought?
Was there an accident, did he die of some rare illness?
No, he had just turned 18 and had moved out.
Susan was about 38, but looked much younger and I never thought that the kid just grew up.
A few years later he came to visit his mom and some the students took him out drinking with them and they were all so happy to report that they were able to dump a very drunk son back on her door.
I shared my office with Richard the Scene Designer and Michael the Lighting Designer and they both smoked cigars.
Of course this was back before the banned smoking in the buildings.
Next year the college is banning smoking anyplace on campus, inside or outside and even in cars except in a few small areas at the back of a few parking lots.
Now I hate smoking but this just seems to be a bit too much.
Anyway our office had been a classroom that was divided into four small rooms with wall panels that had a one foot gap by the ceiling, so noise and smoke drifted between the rooms.
Thankful in the recent renovations my office was rebuilt and I have real walls and my office is fairly large compared to others on campus.
Because I am a 12-month employee I get air conditioning.
I worked closest with the design faculty but I quickly meet and got to know the entire faculty in a short time.
Only Oh-Kon Cho and Bill Hullfish are still here from my first year at Brockport and Bill is set to retire in December.
I only knew one person when I came to Brockport, John who was the friend of Matt my old roommate from Buffalo.
It was almost a week before I ran into John and that story is coming up next.
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I can't remember if we were in Dr. Bakshi's Play Analysis class, or your scenic design class, however, you may have seen this posted in our Cherry Cheesecake group, but a funny thing happened that sticks in our minds to this day. Richard was showing/explaining one of his models and Dr. Bakshi mentioned that the play was or would be mounted at the Theatre at Regina. Needless to say, since that isn't pronounced how you might think, the so mature class broke into hysterical giggles and neither professor was amused. Of course, a few minutes later, Dr. Bakshi understood and he then started literally laughing out loud. A true Brockport theatre moment.
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