Transition

For me the 1990’s was a time of transition.

Teaching at a college there is always change as new students come while others graduate and the staff changes, maybe a bit slower, but still always seems in flux.

With my return from Connecticut in the fall of 1994 the world itself was changing a bit faster than it had in recent years big changes were about to happen but I could not see them at the time.

Computers had been around for a while and we were slowly using them more and more each year and with the coming of Windows 95 and the growth of the internet we would became more reliant on technology more and more in the years ahead.
I will comment more about computers as they were integrated a little more each year to productions and daily lives.

Maybe it was because I was getting older, all of thirty-eight in 1994, but I saw the world and what was happening through a different, perhaps a more mature, perspective.
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In the summer of 1993 I went to my last Grateful Dead concert in Buffalo with tens of thousands of fans at the old Rich Stadium.

Just a side note, the three women I went to the concert with had all been to Woodstock as young teenagers, I did not go.

In the fall of 1994 I saw the Barenaked Ladies in the college ballroom with just a few hundred people.

I was just a few rows from the stage during the “If I had a $1,000,000” song and got to see the boxes of Mac and Cheese flying towards the stage along with clouds of cheese mix in the air.

They returned a year later and played to a sell-out crowd of several thousand in the gym.

Music, people, technology and the whole world around us is always changing but it is hard to see it as it is happening.
Time and distance, the magic of hindsight, gives of different, maybe clearer,  view of what we have lived through.

The first play of the 1994-5 season was The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams with an outside guest director.

I did not know it at the time but this was going to be the last production with the full design and production team that had created some outstanding productions over the past five years.

There were still many more wonderful plays to work on and some very talented students to mentor, but I felt obliged to mark this time as special.

More adventures ahead.

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Bob Feller

Once the last show was up and running I had over a week of free time to relax before the final set strike and clean up at the end of the season.

I took a few days and went to my family cabin near Hancock, NY and spent time with the chipmunks sitting in an Adirondack chair by the outside fireplace and just enjoying it all.

I also stopped by a used book store (and let’s hear for used book stores) and looked for something a bit different than my usual mystery or detective novels I read .

I picked up the autobiography of Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller.

A few days after I returned home from Connecticut I heard on the radio that Bob Feller would be signing autographs at the local minor league ball park and so I decided to go.

I went through my card collection and found one of his cards and went off to the game.

At 76 Bob was still flying his own plane around to ball parks and would sign for hours.

I got my turn and he signed my card with a blunted Sharpie.

I tried to talk with him about his book I had just read but because he was hard of hearing he did not really hold conversations.

He was supposed to sign for an hour before the game but was still there well past the sixth inning.

I still had a few weeks before the new school year would begin again and a new set of adventures were about to begin.

Each year some students graduate or leave and new ones arrive but although I still had some very good students the total number of technical/design majors was falling off.

In the early 1990’s we were able to build large and complex sets because of the staff and large number of skilled students we had.

The start of the 1994-5 school year was the beginning of several years of transition as there would be several staff changes, fewer tech students and building renovations that all effected our productions.

There will still be many well done productions ahead but I still think of the previous few years and a special period and I am proud of what we, the faculty and students, had accomplished.

Up first in the fall of 1994 was The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.

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One Big Thorn

I had a great time in Connecticut in the summer of 1994.

I was proud of the work that my staff and I did and enjoyed meeting an interesting mix of people.

Because the actors and tech staff lived together in the dorm we talked and joked in our free time and told a few “War Stories” about our experiences working in Theatre.

From the director of the first play I learned a few things about how Soap Operas are filmed.

She told me that each day of the week had its own director who filmed only the scenes to be shown on that day, so a party scene that goes on for three or four shows is filmed each day by a different director and not all at once.

One of the actresses in Don’t Dress for Dinner, Melissa Hurst, had a recent baby and her husband, Richard Council, was staying at the school to care for the baby and his was seen walking all over the campus with the baby in a stroller.

On occasion the two would stop by the shop for a visit and see what we were doing.

A few months later while watching The Cosby Mysteries I realized that one of the actors on the show was indeed Richard Council.

The company producer had a Fourth of July pool party at his house and from time-to-time there would be special dinners served outside on the Veranda hosted by the company chef.

It was an almost perfect summer except for one thing or should I say one person.

There was one woman working at the Festival that I did not get along with or should I say she did not get along with me.

I will not mention her name or the job she did but will call her Jane as in Jane Doe.

I will note that from what I saw Jane did her job very well.

Our work schedules only overlapped a little bit but from the first day she made it clear that she felt that my crew and I were in her way.

My guys were working with the Genie lift and Jane walks in and said that she needed it now; I told her she could have it as soon as they were finished with the job.

When I left to work in Connecticut I told myself that I was going to have a good time and not let little things bother me so as Jane continued with her curt and rude remarks I just let them go.

I remember my crew telling me; “hey she was just really rude to you” and I just smiled and said yes she was.

Jane would often come into work just as we were finishing up our workday in the shop and I would always ask she needed us to help her with anything before we left.

She would always bark back: “No I don’t need any help!” and I would smile and say goodnight.

One day when Jane was working earlier than normal and as we all went to lunch I asked her if she was coming too and she just barked something I did not understand and walked away.

A few days later she did show up for lunch and I said without really thinking: “Hey just because I invited you to lunch didn’t mean you could come”.

Of course she exploded and went on and on about not needing my permission to eat and all of us just laughed at her.

I did make an effort to figure out what was going on tried to stop it.

I went to two women in the company who knew what was going on to ask them what I was doing wrong and what I could do about it but both said I was doing nothing wrong and that she was just a bitch.

I think it pissed her off that I just responded to her rudeness with “Have a nice day” and smiles.

Near the end of the summer I did lose my cool and yelled back at her.

We were working with a guest dance company and trying to set up the theatre when Jane starting yelling at me from across the theatre about who knows what.

I told her to stop talking and that I had taken enough of her shit and it was unacceptable for her to talk that way in front of our guests and she needed to apologize to them.

I wish the producer had done something to stop her rude conduct but that never happened.

In the months of returning to Brockport one of my former students, and I have them working everywhere, told a story of working at Jane’s home theatre and how she was rude to people there too.

Another former student working at a theatre that was doing a joint production with Jane’s home theatre told of receiving an overly packed package of what most would consider as consumable items marked with the message: “These items are the property of so-in-so Theatre and are expected to be returned in good condition blah, blah, blah”.

As I said earlier, I thought she was good at her job but had some problem that I could not solve.

If I had found the big thorn in her paw I would have gladly pulled it out.

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Statues and a few Odd Bitz

The sets for three plays that summer each offered their own interesting challenges that made the hard work enjoyable.

The last play required a few unique elements, three life-size statues.

With the Greek Theatre theme to the play the statues would be white but in contemporary poses.

It was decided to use plaster bandage wraps used for broken bone casts and cast whole people.

Even back in 1994 plaster casts were becoming less common place but we found a supplier in Hartford.

I let my assistant Rich take the lead on the casting process in which he did a great job.

Who to cast?

Well it is time for a side story.  

The Westminster School where the Theatre Festival was held was a boarding school for rich kids from all over the world.

Some teenage boy was traveling across America that summer and was looking for interesting places to go.

Somebody who knew somebody suggested he make a stop in Simsbury.

The only thing going on at the school in the summer was soccer camps and the Theatre Festival so he came to hang out with us for week or so.

So this boy who nobody knew hung out with us in the scene shop just as we were about to do the body casting so he became our first victim, I mean model.

So on a hot summer day dressed in shorts; wearing a black garbage bag and covered with Vaseline we began to cover him in plaster.

Ken, British Teen and Rich

We learned a few things on the first attempt.

First we tried to cast too much of the body at once and also plaster gives off a lot of heat as it sets.

Look up exothermic reaction online for hours of fun scientific facts to read and enjoy.

For the next two bodies we did only parts of each body and then joined them together after they were set.

We cast Ken, the other shop assistant, and even Ellen, the scene designer, let us cast her.

You can see two of the body casts in the photos I have posted but Ellen’s body double was sitting just out of the camera’s range.

We did not work all the time that summer and did have some time for fun.

I brought my bicycle and we all rode it around the campus and to town from time to time, plus we played some tennis, badly, and used to school pool a few times.

The company had a good chef on staff and fed us three meals a day.

The chef was cool guy who let us know where the key to the freezer was so we had a few midnight ice cream raids.

Early on I remember going into town to check out one of the bars.

It was a typical bar with several T.V.s on each one with something different.

There were baseball games on a few T.Vs but one had a news channel on that was showing an aerial shot of a slow moving SUV.

Of course that was the infamous O.J. slow chase in the white Ford Bronco.

Someone recommended we check out the view from Heublein Tower on Talcott Mountain.

We stopped by and took the very steep path mile or so up to near the tower.

Cliff by Heublein Tower

I was amazed that people were riding mountain bikes on the path and even more shocked that several people were carrying what looked like large beach umbrellas.

When we got to the top the view was great and the umbrellas turned out to be hang gliders.

It is a very steep cliff edge and those who jump have no room for error.

You can see a video of people flying from that spot at the following link:

http://www.ct-hanggliding.org/

I had a great time that summer and only had one problem that I tried not let bother me.

More next time . . . . .

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