Views From Backstage

The Crazy Lady

2012-01-28T18:02:00.000-08:00

There are not too many groupies waiting outside the stage door for the level and type of Theatre that I have worked on over the years.

On the Rock Concerts that I have worked there was usually a crowd waiting eagerly at the stage door, but even on the professional Theatre Productions I have done the crowds have been small and well behaved.

This does not mean that we do not have regular patrons, who attend our productions, but most times it is just friends and family who wait in the lobby for the actors after a play lets out.

There are some exceptions.

It was about the time that I was working on My Fair Lady that I became aware of who we would come to call “The Crazy Lady”.

After one of the performances I was running around backstage checking on those things that I check on when I saw this woman “playing” with props on the table we had in the cross over hall.

She was handling the 50 cent pieces that we had painted gold for use in the play.

I said something intelligent and forceful like: “ Can I help you? Please leave the props alone”.

She said that she was not stealing them rather she was looking for dates on the coins that she did not have in her collection.

I asked her nicely to leave.

The next time I noticed her she was sitting in her car in the parking lot with her window down listening to the actors talking and having a few beers after the play one night.

She just sat there off to the side in the shadows, listening and living vicariously through what was said.

I would see her again and again over the years and learn a bit more about her, not really knowing what was true.

Evidently “Mrs. T” had worked at the college and was now retired and liked to come to all the events at the college and especially enjoyed opening night receptions and her bag was always a bit larger going home then when she arrived.

I cannot complain too much as I survived college at times on the cheese I got from a few receptions.

Over time she got to know me and everyone who worked in the Theatre and would like to talk and tell us about her daughter and then her granddaughter.

I was told by someone that at one time the college president had an assistant whose job it was to keep her away from him at receptions.

Once she knew who you were she loved to talk and talk and talk.

After years of listening to her stories I finally figured out the easiest way to deal with her.

When I would see her I would go up to her first, say hello and ask her how she was doing and after just a little small talk I would excuse myself and tell I was needed elsewhere.

She has been a loyal patron over the years and saying hello is not too much of a price to pay.

She must be in her eighties by now and not in great health but she still shows up from time to time.

It took me a while but I finally realized that she was harmless and just a very lonely person.

I saw her car one day and it was packed solid with an odd mixture of junk and it looked like it belonged to someone on “Hoarders”.

I can only imagine what her house must look like.

My running joke lately that when she goes to the “great reception in the sky” she is going to leave the college millions and we will get a new Theatre.

We do have a few regular patrons, former college employees and other locals, who come to our production and I always try to thank them when I see them in the lobby before or after a production.

One couple’s daughter worked for me one summer about twenty years ago and over the years I got to hear stories about her life as she went to college, got a job and eventually married.

I must admit there are people who come and talk with me; ask how I am doing, about my wife and even our granddaughter but I have no idea who they are, but I am happy to see them and still glad they came.

Back during my first few summer productions at Brockport there would be a bar in the lobby and the second act of the plays always went better.

Unfortunately with the changing drinking laws have a bar in the lobby of a college theatre would become a thing of the past.

We never had problems with drunken patrons but did have several occasions have groups of loud drunk students pass through the lobby on their way to or from the bars in town.

*

My Fair Lady

2012-01-21T21:30:00.000-08:00

I felt confident and good going into my second Summer Arts Festival at Brockport.

Having gone through two school years and a summer I knew what was in store and I had built up a good working relationship with the students who were staying to work on the two plays.

We did have a few non-students who worked on the production but most were theatre and other students who stayed in town for the summer.

Some students would get course credit for working while most would get a small paycheck for lots of hard work.

Although the rehearsals and set construction would begin in June the planning of the production would begin months earlier when the production team was put together, sets and costumes designs prepared and auditions were often done as early as March.

The department faculty designers did not always stay for the summer plays and for My Fair Lady an outside set designer was hired.

The production was a true “Town and Gown” production with a mixture of students, college faculty and staff and a variety of local actors appearing in the play.

The audience looked forward to the productions each summer and some of the local actors became crowd favorites over the years.

The Scenic Designer they hired worked at Geva Theatre, the local Professional Theatre in Rochester.

I guess because of that connection I had been hired to do some freelance set construction work over spring break in March and for about a week I helped build the set for a production of Born Yesterday, working mostly on a large curved staircase.

I enjoyed working there and always wished I had more time to work there and do more outside jobs, but my job my job at Brockport requires me to work on or supervise all of the Theatre and Music events at the college and it has always been hard to find the time to in fit outside work into my schedule.

My Fair Lady was going to be a large traditional set with many scenes and a number of painted backdrops.

Five or six brand new backdrops were ordered ahead of time so that they would be ready to paint as soon as we began working in June.

One of the first things we did when the crew came to work was to clear everything out of our Black-Box Theatre and stretch out and staple down two of the new backdrops to the floor so that they would be ready for the designer to paint.

As soon as the first two backdrops were painted we would take them up, hang them in the Mainstage Theatre and place two fresh ones down.

Unfortunately the backdrops sat unpainted on the Theatre floor for weeks.

We were busy building the many flats, stair units and other set pieces required for use in the set.

The biggest set was Professor Higgins' house that was made up of many of many walls and a large staircase unit that rolled on and off as needed.

Some of the students asked the designer when he would paint the backdrops and if they could help but he would always put them off and said that the work would begin soon.

One drop was eventually painted and looked very good and it reassured everyone that things would be done on time.

The first painted backdrop was the hallway in Professor Higgins' house that used for the many crossover scenes, but nothing else was done for a long time.

My crew worked hard every day and all of the set pieces were done on time but unfortunately not the backdrops.

Opening night we had only the one painted backdrop and I had to hang just black curtains and one white unpainted backdrop to fill the stage.

For the "Ascot Gavotte" we had nothing but the actors in front of a black drape and for Eliza’s big moment at the “Embassy Waltz" we had a nice double stair unit but just a blank backdrop behind it.

For the romantic scene of “On the Street Where You Live" we had a nice front door and steps of the house but nothing to go around it and were forced to hang some black drapes and pin one up so it would go around the doorway.

One night the stage manager, another crew member and I got stuck behind the unit as the curtains got caught up on the door unit and we could not get off with being seen as the scene went on.

The Stage Manager still had her headset on and called the cues the best should could.

The second weekend of the production the backdrop for this scene was painted and we hung it.

Even with the set problems the show went off well and the audience enjoyed the production.

I liked the Set Designer and he did good work, I know he was going through some person issues but I never found out why he waited so long to get started on the painting until it was too late.

The summer plays were always a lot of work and we always had fun.

We did take time to set off the Fourth of July fireworks as we had done the summer before and I remembered to wear my hearing protection unlike the first year.

After the dress rehearsals and performances the cast and crew always went out for a few drinks and some nights there was even some “Tailgating” as one of the cast members would have a cooler of beers and they would just party in the parking lot.

This was 28 years ago and although drinking and driving was bad then, people did not take as seriously as we do now and that fact that more people did not get into trouble was just luck.

Sky King

2012-01-12T19:44:00.000-08:00

By the end of my second year working at Brockport I had fallen into a vacation pattern that I would follow for about the next ten years with little change.

I would visit my family on Long Island three times a year; I would spend a week to ten days at Christmas time, in May right after school ended and before beginning work on the summer shows and also in August after the second show was done and before school would start again in the fall.

During my time back on Long Island I would often make time to go into NYC to see a Broadway play.

As I had done back in college, I would wait at the TKTS booth and buy a ticket for whatever I thought would be the best or most interesting play to me.

My second year had been good and I enjoyed working on the plays and felt more in control than my first year.

I was looking forward to the summer shows, My Fair Lady and Wait Until Dark, but with the Lighting Design teacher not getting tenure I was not sure how he would react and what would happen that summer or the next year.

Because of the way of our Union contract is written, the Lighting Designer had a whole year left to work before he was out of a job and I was hoping it was not going to be a year of hell if he was pissed off and would take it out on the students and everyone around him.

Knowing that people may not get tenure, meaning maybe me, I felt about the same as in grad school when they kicked two of my classmates out of the program, uneasy.

As it turned out it he was cool and continued to work hard that summer and the next year, but I did not know that before hand and was always a bit on edge that third year.

For some reason, time and/or cheap airfare, I flew home for my vacation and family visit that May.

I had a good time and the night before I was to fly back I went out with my younger brother to have a few drinks.

We had a good time and decided to drop in on one more bar on the way home and of course there was someone there who insisted on buying me a few shots that I did not need.

Not wanting to be rude I had those drinks and would pay for it big time the next day.

I got up with a hangover and all I wanted to do was get on the plane, sleep an hour, get back to my house and sleep.

Well things did not go as I had planned.

First of all the plane from Islip to Rochester was a small single engine model with about 12 seats and the pilot thought he was “Sky King” and I swear he did loops just for fun.

Needless to say my head was really hurting by the time the plane got back to Rochester and I got back to my house.

So finally I lay down on my bed and less than an hour later my phone rang and being a fool I answered it.

“Gary can you help me, I got kicked out of my apartment and need to move”.

I knew before my trip home that my friend Jane had to move and I had offered her the use of my extra room for a few weeks before her new place was ready.

So over the next painful six hours I helped move her shit to some other friend’s barn in the next town.

Somehow I managed to survive that day but I am not sure how.

Although Jane and I had a platonic relationship I am sure there were hopeful desires of a future romance that powered me on that day.

She was a cool girl and I had a lot of fun with her and you can read all about our advetures in my secret memoirs - if I ever write them.

I do not want to get too far off topic but Jane was a Theatre minor and did do some work in the Theatre so bringing her up is appropriate to this Blog.

There was this one day when Jane was annoying me and I tied her to one of the columns in Theatre and told the others to leave her there for a while.

Ah, the good old days.

There was a lot of work to do that second summer and lots of fun too as we worked on the two plays and we also got to set off the 4^th of July fireworks works again.

I did learn from the year before and remembered to wear my sound muffs that second time.

Show stories and more to follow.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

2011-12-13T10:45:00.000-08:00

The last play of my second year at Brockport was Tennessee William’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Like the previous play the set was large and had many challenges to add extra fun.

To start with the hydraulic stage lift in the front of the stage broke.

Because of a hydraulic fluid leak or other mechanical malfunction the lift was stuck just above house level and I was force to build platforms that would come up to the stage level before I could then start building the real set for the show.

Most of the set was taken up with the bedroom of the house with a little side room visible on Stage Left and wrap around veranda that came all the across the back of the set and down on Stage Right.

The main platform of course had to be raked (slanted) was about 16’-0” x 30’-0”.

Being young, foolish and over eager I over-designed the sub-structure and built an entire open wooden frame with the required angled legs first and then we put the stock platforms in place and attached them.

After the play was over I thought it would be good to save time and materials in the future and had the 4’-0” x 16’-0” frames covered with plywood and added them to our stock.

They would be used many times over the coming years and student would often bitch about moving them especially when they had to carry them up the stairwell when the stage lift was not available.

They got used many times and most are now gone after being altered many times to fit a current show’s needs but I think I may still have one at the bottom of our platform pile in the basement.

As much work as the platform was, the walls took even more time and effort to get done.

At this time, 1984, we were still using traditional 1x3 canvas covered flats and the scene designer had me remove all of the fabric from the frames.

The walls, 20’-0” high, were then covered with numerous 1’ slats of ¼” plywood that had been ripped down.

Again this was at a time before we used lauan plywood which would have been a lot lighter and easier to use.

I also had to make about eight to ten tall columns with 1x2 pine board strips to mirror the slats on the walls of the set.

Some of the columns were still in the basement until a few years ago when they were stripped down and the wood recycled into a new show.

Windows and doors were also made just for this set.

I also used some stock doors on the set that the scene designer had me cut slots into the door panels and I was a bit shocked when he took a hammer and smashed out some the pieces.

We also hung two ceiling fans over the main room with longer blades that we made so that would better fit the scale of the set.

But wait there’s more!

Behind the Cyc there was a lighted moon box that would be raised up a little bit at a time as the play progressed.

The moon box was attached to our then new Genie lift, a hand cranked Genie.

When it first came everyone thought it was great and it made things easier, well at first that is.

To rise up you would have to just use you two hands and crank yourself up.

Easy, no problem; well the first time at least.

Each time you needed to move first you had to crank down, be moved, then crank back up and then repeat and repeat.

After a few times you arms would numb and you could not use it anymore.

After a month or so the gear works got gunked up and it was even harder to use.

When it was replaced some time later with an electrical model it was a welcome addition.

To dress the set the scene designer went out along the Erie Canal and cut some bushes and brought them back and dressed the columns on the veranda of the set.

This was nothing new for him to do but what it unique for this production it that over the course of the production the plants continued to grow and both leaves and flowers bloomed but most had dies by the time of the last performance.

Just before the show opened the scene designer glued pieces of tissue paper behind the slats on the set that caught the light as it came through.

He told me that it was his gift to the lighting designer who of course did not like it but I think it made the set look great.

Most people who knew the scene designer at that time might tell you he was a bit wacky, odd or whatever, but this was one of his better sets that I worked on.

So if that wasn’t enough there is yet even more ! ! !

In the space upstage of the set and in front of the Cyc some special effects were used.

The lighting designer hung down from a pipe several electrical wires that had little homemade firework bundles attached that were fired off during the play.

They were made with model rocket launcher squibs, flash paper and a small amount of real firework “fixings”.

They looked great, but of course were a fire hazard and I had to seal in the back of the platforms after seeing sparks come under the set at the first set.

Somehow we did not burn down the theatre and everyone survived the play.

The production was well received and of course it looked great too.

It was a ton of work, crazy most of the time but lots of fun.

Note that the cast parties were numerous and fun.

Soon after the play was over the lighting designer got a letter telling him that he did not get tenure.

Needles to say he was crushed and the next year would be hard for him as it would be his last.

I did not know it at the time but things would soon change for me in ways I did not plan or see coming.

The Threepenny Opera

2011-11-26T18:43:00.000-08:00

The spring of 1984 brought two large productions.

The first was The Threepenny Opera by German dramatist Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill.

The actors enjoyed being in show, especially those paying the thieves and whores as it gave everyone a chance to let go and have fun.

I had worked on it just three years before at Theatre Three on Long Island and although it was a nice production the Brockport production was on a much larger stage and had a more complex set.

The Threepenny Opera, 1984

It was the first show that I worked on at Brockport to use the lighting bridge as part of the set.

The lighting bridge is a moving catwalk that spans forty feet across the stage just upstage of the proscenium and holds the first and second electrics.

I needed to build tall staircases up to the bridge from each side of the stage so that the actors could go up and cross over it as needed.

It would be used twenty years later as part of the set for the summer musical Cabaret.

The set had lots of moving parts; set units that rolled on, flew in or were carried on.

I was excited on opening night as a friend from college came out from Buffalo to see the show.

The Threepenny Opera, 1984

Everything was ready and set to go so I felt comfortable that I could go out to dinner before the show and sit with my friend in the audience.

Big Mistake.

Unbeknownst to me, at sometime in the afternoon the set designer (Richard) decided to dress the set and added many items from the prop room on to the wood beams that were flown in as part of Peachum’s shop.

Richard had poorly wired tons of junk on to the set and during the black out for the scene change I heard a big bang as the beams smashed into the floor and then several crashes as pieces fell of the set.

He did not tell anyone that he added the items nor did he re-weight the pipe that the beams were on.

I jumped out of my seat and ran backstage to see what had happened.

This is one of the big reasons that I do not like to sit in the house during performances.

We were lucky as no one was hurt as anything broken but it could have been worse.

I know that I cannot be everyplace that there might be a problem, but locked in a seat makes me feel trapped and it makes hard to run backstage or to the lighting booth to fix whatever problem that might arise.

Although made up mostly students, there were several college staff and community members who helped fill out the cast.

The role of Jenny (a prostitute) was played by the faculty costume designer and I seem to remember that some of the scenes with the student actors were a bit awkward.

As I think back to this show I recall that it had small double swing café doors similar to ones I need to hang ones on my current production’s set tomorrow.

After forty years in Theatre I find that things do repeat more and more often, but there are still many challenging and interesting problems that come up with each new production and that is what keeps me going.

The Next Play

2011-11-18T14:39:00.000-08:00

When I started my Blog I thought I would write at least once a week, and then I fell back to twice a month at best.

I still have plenty of stories to share and will have more time to get back into my Blog after the next play opens on December 2^nd.

The current play: Carlo Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters.

http://www.brockport.edu/newsbureau/1675.html

A few construction photos of "The Current Play":

The Sevant of Two Masters

For those who work in Theatre it is always the current play, meetings, construction and lighting focus calls, rehearsals and performances that takes our full attention.

We always think that we will have more time once the current play opens.

I do have at least six weeks off and plan to play more with my new scanner to add many more photos before I have to get to work on "The Next Play".

Oh, the next play: Coyote on a Fence by Bruce Graham in February.

New Scanner

2011-10-26T20:45:00.000-07:00

Just a short update today.
I bought a new slide scanner and I am able to scan old slides that I have not seen in a long time and I will add them to my into my older blog posts.
I will let my readers know after I have added them.

I do not have a lot to say today so I thought I would add some Technical Theatre related covers that I like and find interesting and they are over 100 years old.

After reading the stats for my Blog I still find it amazing on the number of international readers that I have and I hope that you still find what I have to say interesting.

The lastest play that I worked on had just closed; dark play or stories for boys.

Follw the link to see picyures of the production:

http://www.brockport.edu/theatre/DarkPlay.html

Next up for me A Servant of Two Masters that will open in December.

Androcles and the Lion

2011-10-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

Our second production in the fall of 1983 was Androcles and the Lion directed our new faculty member Richard St. George.

A Children’s Theatre play would not have been his first choice but he had been assigned it and did a nice job.

I do not remember why but the set was designed by our Costume Designer Susan Tucker.

To add to the fun the play was to tour to local schools in addition to several performances at the college.

The design was fairly simple why a raked platform that had poles on each side with a cable running across so that curtains with different painted scenes could be used.

Actors would hide behind the backdrops and jump out from time to time during the play.

There were also several trap doors in the platform that were used to hide props and a few foam cutout scenery/props were used.

The platform is still in our basement storage area and it was used for at least one other play.

I kept it because of the method used to build it was a variation of the old parallel platform frames and it is very different from the standard 2x4 platforms that we use most of the time.

Adam Lazzare was teaching a large section on Introduction to Theatre with close to 200 students and being the nice guy I am, I offered to help grade some of the critiques.

Okay, so Adam was still the Dean back then and I thought it would be good for me to be helpful.

Anyway one of us, and I do not remember who, found a critique that was not like the others.

Yes from time-to-time we would find people who copied each other’s work but this one was unique.

The student had copied a 1946 New York Times review of the play for his critique.

His defense when confronted was: “You told us to do some research”

I do not remember what happened to the student but I am sure he was not expelled for cheating.

Adam was a very popular teacher here at Brockport when I came in 1982.

Often on the first day of class he would walk into the large lecture hall in sun glasses and a trench coat, fire off a blank gun and run off.

He said that he wanted to expose the student to a “Theatrical Moment”.

Not something that would go over well today.

He was the Dean for a few years and then stepped down and was our department chair for a few more years and retired in 1991.

I invited me to his house for Thanksgiving one year after hearing me talking with his secretary that I did not have any plans and was not going back home to Long Island.

Being young and not knowing any better I brought some cheap wine as a gift.

He was not insulted but chose to open a 100 year old bottle of Madeira he was saving for a special occasion after dinner instead of the Gallo swill that I had brought.

The tree planted in his horror after his last production at Brockport still stands in front of the Tower Fine Arts Center and is now taller than the building.

The Diary of Anne Frank

2011-10-05T16:19:00.000-07:00

The summer plays, working on the fireworks and having fun with my friends was a nice cap to the end of my first full year in Brockport.

My younger brother Mark, then 20, drove up to visit during the summer and I gave him the grand tour and we had a few beers with my friends and some fun along the way.

I was eager to begin my second year at Brockport.

My first year was exciting and I felt I had learned a lot and had a new confidence in myself and my skills.

I was no longer the new guy; I had a good working relationship with the older students and had a good crop of freshmen and transfer students to work with.

Our first play in the fall of 1983 was The Diary of Anne Frank.

It was a large set with three levels that started 11 feet below the stage with stairs and platforms coming up from the orchestra pit to the stage level.

There were two side rooms that were raised platforms and an attic level above the kitchen area upstage.

Above the set was a large roof section resting on a long ridge beam hanging from cable from the grid.

It was a large and complex set but somehow we got it done with the time we had.

When we set our production season today I try for us to avoid large productions in the first slot in the fall because of the short period of time we have to get it ready.

I had 19 students in my Stagecraft class plus at least 5 or 6 work study students working together to get the set done.

The play had a good cast and the production was well received.

I remember that the strike lasted late into the night and it was one of the last where we had beer onstage when it was over.

I recently posted some of the photos seen here on my Facebook page and got many positive responses from the students who had worked on the show.

One of the actors reminded me of the cat we used in the play and how it infested the set and actors with fleas.

I remember waiting at someone’s house for a the cast to come for a party when the photo call was completed after of the performances and they were all late and pissed because it took longer than the play itself.

The director wanted pictures of ever moment and I remember seeing photos of scenes that I never saw during the play as she most have reposed things just for the photo call.

It was a good start to my second year and the next play was all together different, but fun, always fun.

My 1st Year at Brockport Done

2011-09-18T21:03:00.000-07:00

In addition to four department plays and two summer arts productions I had plenty of other events to keep me busy my first year at Brockport.

Harlequins, the student Theatre group, produced two plays and there were at least six senior project productions that year.

My first year at Brockport was also the last year of the Music Department and I helped on a number of their large concerts and several senior recitals.

My level of involvement varied on these events but I often choose to do more than I was required to.

I was happy to design the lighting for one senior project because it had been over a year since my last design and helped build the set for another play.

Over time I learned to let student do more for themselves, but have always tried to be there help when needed and to prevent problems when possible.

There would be plenty of changes over the years.

Of course the student population is always changing with students coming and going; some stay just a semester and others never seem to leave.

There would also be many changes in the staff over the past 30 years.

One of the Theatre professors left at the end of my first year to become a Dean at another college and we hired Dick St. George to take his place for the next year.

As I started my second year at Brockport it was nice that I was no longer the new guy.

I was eager to take what I had learned during my first year, make some changes and hopefully do a better job the next year.

The productions during my second year were bigger and offered many more challenges than those of my first year.

The plays for the 1983-84 season were: Androcles and The Lion, The Diary of Anne Frank, Threepenny Opera and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Stories to follow.

9/11 - Ten Years Later

2011-09-06T19:53:00.000-07:00

On a sunny Tuesday morning ten years ago I was watching the Today Show as I was getting ready for work and saw the first reports of a fire at the World Trade Center.

Just a few minutes into the report I saw a plane hit the second Tower live on TV and like most others watching that day I knew that the World as we knew it had just changed forever.

Things happened fast that day and by the time I got to work the Towers had fallen, the Pentagon had been hit and Flight 93 had crashed in Pennsylvania.

Just before noon we got word that the State was closing down the College and all State Buildings and everyone was sent home.

Like most people I watched the TV reports for the rest of the day and tried to figure out what had happened and what was next.

* * *

Too many people were lost that day and I found out a few years later that I had once met one of those heroes thirty-five years ago while I was still in college.

He was the twin brother of one of my friends and I enjoyed a few beers and some laughs with him during a visit to Buffalo.

* * *

Please take a minute to remember him and all of those who we lost on 9/11.

Geoffrey E. Guja

Age: 47

Hometown: Lindenhurst, N.Y., USA

Occupation: Firefighter, New York Fire Department

Location: Ground, World Trade Center

* * *

Cars and Chick Peas

2011-08-23T19:30:00.000-07:00

All through college and while working in NYC I never had or needed a car, but when I got the job at Brockport I needed to borrow my folk’s box van to move up from Long Island.

It was fun to have the van and I even used it to pick up lumber for the first play I worked on at Brockport, but soon my parents wanted it back and drove up and exchanged it for their Ford Pinto, a wonderful little car complete with an 8-Track player!

This is the infamous car that got Ford in trouble when it was alleged that they decided it was cheaper to pay off a few lawsuits then fix the problem with the gas tanks that made the cars explode in accidents.

Ford Pinto

It was one of the first hatch-backs and was not quite as ugly as the AMC Pacer and just five years later I would buy a new Ford Escort GT, the car that replaced to Pinto.

It was to be my parents’ only trip up to Brockport and I gave them the full 50-cent tour.

My younger readers may not understand why I find the next story so funny.

While out with my parents for dinner my father looks down at his salad it says loudly:

“What’s this in my salad?”

“Mmm, it’s a chick pea Dad, you know a garbanzo bean.”

While common today’s salads, back in 1982 my Dad was still expecting the basic 1950’s salad: lettuce, tomato and maybe an onion slice, but chick peas, olives or sunflower seeds were just too new for him at that time.

For those of us a bit older it is amazing how much food has changed over the years and that younger people think that we always had microwaves and that chichen has always been boneless.

When I drove the Pinto home at Christmas I found that my parents had bought me my own car; a green 1972 AMC Javelin.

It cost $500!

AMC Javelin

The car may have had the look of a classic muscle car, but with only about 100 hp it seemed to have less power than my John Deere mower.

AMC did make the AMX model that was sexy, powerful and had a cult following, but my base model Javelin had little power and died less than two years late, but through the kindness and help of a few friendly auto parts dealers and car mechanics I did learn a lot working on that car.

I learned how to replace gas and oil pumps, the starter motor and assorted filters, fuses and belts and I was even taught how to “Hot Wire” the car with just a screw driver.

As much "Fun" (Read: lots of work, pain in the butt) as the Javelin was I had arranged to buy my sister's 1977 Camaro Rally Sport soon after she gave birth to her first son and needed a family car.

It was one of the last years that cars had real crome bumpers.

Camaro Rally Sport

Just a few days before I was to go to Long Island pick up the Camaro the Javelin blew its transmission.

Even with just the base V-8, my Camaro still had tons of power and because it was the LT model it had AC and power everything.

I enjoyed driving it for the next few years and managed to get only one speeding ticket.

Although fun to drive it was not at all a practical car and soon after turning 30 I thought it was time to get my first brand new and “Adult” car, but for a few years I felt cool zipping about in my Camaro.

* * *

I start my 30th year teaching at Brockport on Monday look forward to new challenges and adventures.

Bus Stop and One Year Complete

2011-08-16T12:11:00.000-07:00

The second production of the summer of 1983 was Bus Stop and I got to design both the sets and lighting for the play.

It was going to be first my first real full designs at Brockport and I wanted them to come off well.

Bus Stop Set Rendering, 1983

We only had 6 days between the end of Show Boat and the opening of Bus Stop so we had to work fast.

The construction started right after Show Boat opened, as we worked in the shop by day and ran the musical at night.

It made for long days but everyone seemed to enjoy it and took pride in getting it all done and often we would stop at Barbers or The Rox for a beer before heading home.

Although it was hard work it was not as long and crazy as the summer I spent at Gateway Playhouse when we did four big shows plus several children’s production, but it was still a lot to get done in a short time with our small crew.

We used a lot of stock canvas flats and a few custom-built triangular ones for the ceiling and side return flats.

I was very happy with the results and the play went well.

The play takes place during a snow storm and we had a little effects projector that looked OK but I think it died soon after the play opened and we had no snow effect for most of the performances.

At that time the Department would to hold the second show over and perform it one weekend right at the start of school in September.

This is why I had worked on Sherlock Holmes the first day I got to Brockport almost a year before.

I had a new place to live, one of my colleagues sublet me his house while he was away on sabbatical, and I let two of the cast members stay with me the week of the hold over performances.

Because they had just graduated and moved to Boston but came back for the shows I thought the least I could do is save them some money and have them stay in my extra room.

The first year went well but was not without incident.

I already mentioned that Ralph dislocated his shoulder during Show Boat but he also cut his elbow open at strike.

He got back from the hospital in time to take another student who had stepped on a nail to the ER.

While putting up some final decoration for the play a student came in during the afternoon and he was warned that some of the stage battens were down and we were working with them.

Well he just kept walking bent down and ducked under the first pipe but came up hitting the second one and knocked himself out cold.

He came to quickly, and although a bit Woozy, he performed that night.

Back in February there was a major incident on The Tangled Yarn just a day or two before it opened when one of the actors, who was also a bit off, went completely nuts and caused some problems and was thrown out of the show.

Of course he was pissed, made lots of noise, smashed a few things on the way out and disappeared.

He was arrested few days later when he attached a girl on campus and we never saw him again.

The actor who took over, Ralph, did a much better job even with a script in hand.

As I went back and read through the programs from my first year at Brockport I found that about sixteen former students and six other people I met that first year are current Facebook friends with me.

Like most summers I have had a few visits from former students and I always enjoy when they come by, regardless of whichever “generation” they are from, the 1980’s, 1990’s, 2000’s and even ones who just graduated in May.

I like to hear their stories and hope that time at Brockport had helped them along their life’s journey in some way.

I did not know back then how much the experiences and people from that first year had built a foundation from which my life would grow.

With the first year of school and productions and with a few weeks off but I was eager to start my second year and see what adventures were still ahead.

Show Boat and Fireworks

2011-08-10T09:30:00.000-07:00

My first year at Brockport was very exciting, challenging and lots of fun and it felt good to be in a real Theatre job.

Being a Technical Director was not the job that I had trained for but three years later when I would also become the Lighting Designer things got closer to what I had hoped to be doing back in school.

Even then I did not know that I would still be at Brockport about to begin my 30^th year.

It has always been the unknown challenges of each new production that has excited me and has kept me coming back for more.

To that point in time no design faculty had ever been given tenure at Brockport and even though that first year in Brockport was good I kept an eye out for other jobs.

I was not sure what I was looking for but it is just the nature of Theatre that while we are working on one show we are always planning for the next one and that is the way I saw my job.

As I posted in a previous blog entry, I would keep looking for another job for the next fifteen years before I felt comfortable enough to call Brockport my home.

Next up was my first summer at Brockport and two productions; Showboat and Bus Stop.

My first few summers at Brockport the department produced two shows, then cut back to one and now we have no summer show.

The production staff was all regular department personnel and student workers.

Over the years there would be more outsiders involved in the production, but back then it was just like another regular department show.

Showboat was what is often called a Town and Gown show where most of the cast were students, faculty and college staff members with a few local actors mixed in.

None of the actors were paid back then and my student shop staff made very little.

I remember one of my first fights with the Chairman/Producer was about paying the student workers.

I think they made about $1000 working on two plays over 10 weeks with few days off.

He thought that they should only get $100 each, and I told him was crazy, full of shit and that we would not have any workers if he tried to cut their pay.

The set for Showboat was a large river boat made up of three large two-story rolling sections that were moved in various positions to be both the inside and outside of the boat.

A few other smaller set pieces were also used for some of the scenes.

I was very impressed on how hard the crew worked to build and run the show.

One night during the show one of the actors, who was also an assistant stage manager, was tripped by a platform coming by, fell and dislocated his shoulder.

Evidently this had happened to Ralph before, and although in pain told me to follow him into the scene shop.

Holding on to the very heavy table saw with his good arm Ralph had me pull on his other arm and “Pop” it back in place.

He then ran back into the Theatre and went back on stage.

The Show Must Go On.

We did party from time to time and even worked on the 4^th of July.

Working in Show Biz seems like it is all fun to those on the outside but it is often lots of long hard hours.

We did take time off those first two summers for the town fireworks, not to see them but to run them!

The then lighting designer, Mike, was trained in pyrotechnics and fireworks and ran the show.

I think back now and cringe a bit to think that all of the fireworks were stored in several boxes in what is now my office and Mike would label and organize all of the shells.

In the afternoon of the day of the show we would go over to the field and dig holes for the pipes that would be used as the mortars that would launch the shells.

We would also set up the single-use cardboard tubes for the shells that were used as part of the Grand Finale.

It was July and of course it was very hot but we still had to wear long sleeves and hats to stop the falling burning embers from the firework shells.

It is hard to describe the experience without saying it was a BLAST!

During the show I was assigned two mortars to load with the firework shells that were stored 50 feet away in a covered box.

I would run back and forth between the mortars and boxes, stopping to clean out the mortar between shots, careful not to look in or have your head over the end on the pipe.

One of the years we did have a shell that went up and came back in the same field near us, the firemen quickly put it out and we had no other problems.

During the show I was so busy I did not get to watch and enjoy much of it as I was so focused on the job at end.

At the end of the half hour show I was drenched with sweat, exhausted but very pumped up and went out with the crew for some celebratory beers.

The second year was just as much fun but I remember to wear ear plugs.

I still had one more show to design and build before the end of my first full year at Brockport.

Plays, Parties and Beer

2011-08-08T21:21:00.000-07:00

The forth play of my first year at Brockport was The Country Wife.

It was the biggest and most complex set of the year and it offered some challenges and I enjoyed working it.

It was a big unit set with some smaller set piece that rolled or flew in to change the scenes.

The Country Wife, 1983

One item I built myself was a large 4 x 8 window that came out well, looked good onstage and became a frequently used item in our scenery stock.

Almost 30 years later we still have the window and it was most recently used this past year in the set for Black Comedy.

The Country Wife window re-used in 2011

Also a part of the set were three signs cut out of ¼” ply that represented various shops that were supposed to be on the stage.

Two of the signs, a shoe and beer mug, were mounted on the scene shop wall until the recent renovations and I saved them and hope to put them back up along with a few other pieces from the past.

Images of the signs will fellow soon.

There were plenty of other that kept me busy that first year; teaching classes, music events and numerous student productions.

Harlequins, the Student Theatre group, did a production of Happy Birthday Wanda June by Kurt Vonnegut.

Like too many other student shows over the coming years, they used too much scenery and platforms that were too high for the Lab Theatre.

I have tried time and again to advise the student designers about what will work in the Lab, but most of the time they want to do it themselves and do not want to listen to experience.

Over the years there have been a few very nice student sets that worked well and fit nicely in the Lab Theatre, but not too many.

When I was first hired I was just the Technical Director so I jumped at a chance to design the lighting for one of the senior projects and helped on many others as well.

I did not mind working on the music events except when a concert was planned for the afternoon right after the night we struck a big set.

It was a bit tuff working until 2:00 AM or later, having a strike party and then coming in early the next day to set up for a music concert.

My first year at Brockport the drinking age was still 18 and drinking was an important part of all cast and strike parties.

Within a year or two the drinking age was moved up to 21 and we no longer could have a cooler of beer onstage for when the strike was over.

It was always a celebration of another production coming to an end, not about people getting drunk.

Strike parties have a long tradition in Theatre but things change and we could no longer have alcohol on campus.

Yes, drinking still goes on at student parties but I have not gone to one in a long time.

Unlike K-12 teachers, most college professors do not take any classes in how to teach.

So that first year I had to figure it many things out fast; how and what to teach, how to run college crews and probably the hardest thing - What was going to be my relationship with the students?

Boss? Friend? Big Brother? Teacher?

It is different today when I am almost 30 years older than most of my students, but back then when I was just a few years older than most of the students and often would run into them at local bars or at parties.

Because there was no rule book I had to figure out my own rules and guidelines but I knew enough that I would not date any of my students.

I know that I made a few mistakes, but that never stopped me from flirting and having fun.

But nothing would be wrong with dating a student who graduated before I came to Brockport or was a Theatre major at another college.

It was good that I did have some non-Theatre friends (the Deadheads and others) as it was impossible to live in town and not run into some of my students.

I did not try to hide from my students and often would have a good time hanging out with them but there always was that little thing in the back of my head that kept reminding that me that I was now an adult and was expected to make the right choice.

Being an adult, oh well.

First four Plays at Brockport

2011-07-14T06:40:00.000-07:00

Most years the Theatre Department at Brockport produces four major productions with faculty or guest directors.

A few times have we done only three because of scheduling problems but we have done five plays on a couple occasions.

My first year we did four plays: An Enemy of the People, by Henrik Ibsen, The ABC’s by Beth Linnerson, The Tangled Yarn by Stephen Levi and The Country Wife by William Wycherley.

I have already covered what most of what happened with An Enemy of the People and having survived that first production and was ready to jump right into the next show.

The second production was a Children’s Theatre piece.

Children’s Theatre has always been big at Brockport and when I first came here it was a major part of our production program.

When I interviewed for my job in NYC one of the faculty asked me what I thought about Children’s Theatre and not knowing that she ran the program I opened my big mouth and told just what I thought.

My only real exposure to Children’s Theatre had been during Summer Stock six years at Gateway Playhouse.

At Gateway they used whatever set was on the mainstage at the time and produced their play in front of it the afternoons before the evening musicals for adults.

Most of the actors were from the pool of sixteen year old girls who were “studying” acting at Gateway and they wrote their own scripts based what they knew about the basic story lines of the classic children’s stories.

A few of the adult actors were used to help run the shows and we made a few small set pieces and props in the shop to make the shows work.

When they did Puss and Boots on the Candide set it looked pretty good, but I do not think it worked quite as well when it was performed in front of the Gay Bath House set of The Ritz a few weeks later.

I was not impressed by the results the plays.

Build it fast, build it cheap and then pack the Theatre with hundreds of screaming kids on hot summer afternoons.

Of course they would sell them candy and get them all sugared up before the show.

So I told the woman who ran the Brockport Arts for Children Program about this and that I saw Children’s Theatre as a bit of a rip off and I felt that they often talked down to the kids.

I heard later she was upset at my answer, but if you do not want know what I think then do not ask me.

In any case I did get the job and now I was ready to do a “proper” Children’s Theatre production, The ABC’s.

The target audience was three and four year olds, so you know this was going to rival Shakespeare.

About eight actors in pajamas running about the stage play with six large blocks with letters painted on them

The smallest cube was one by one foot and they got bigger and bigger with the last one being four by four feet.

The largest one set in the corner of the basement and I just got rid of it two years ago at the start of the building renovations.

“Hi kids, A is for Apple, B is for Banana and C is for what a pile of Crap!”

OK maybe I was being a bit of a Theatre snob, but it was not my favorite play and we would do much better Children’s plays in the coming years.

Maybe the play was not really all that bad and it would have worked better in a small Theatre or room, but it was lost on the big stage especially with the kids sitting down in the auditorium seats far away from the actors up on the stage.

I thought getting back to working on an adult play for the third play would be better but I was wrong.

The Tangled Yarn was an original play by a playwright somebody found and had brought in.

I do not know if he was someone’s friend or what, but I was not impressed by the script, I would tell you the plot but I never figured it out.

It was memory play about the main character’s mother, growing up with repressed sexual emotions, blah, blah, blah.

The set was an big open black void, a few acting cubes, a simple table and a big spider web of jute twine over the stage,

The Tangled Yarn,

get it,

do you need me to explain it,

I will,

you see . . . . .

The forth play of the year, The Counrty Wife, was much better and there were also many other productions to keep me busy that first year, senior projects, student plays, music events and more.

I will try to figure out the rest of my first year at Brockport and tell you more next time.

THE MEANING OF LIFE, and other small things

2011-07-07T16:39:00.000-07:00

After a crazy few days of classes, rehearsals, signing forms, and just getting settled in my new job I was surprised it did not take me too long to find a place to live.
It was a small one bedroom apartment in a house with four units.
I am not sure why, but the landlord had to two guys living there move upstairs to another apartment.
It surprises me that I am still friends with many of my first students, the Deadheads and others from my first party in Brockport but even more surprisingly I am still friends with Woody, one of the two guys who had to move before I could move in.

As I look back there are many people I met that first week, month and year both that I still run into and see with from time to time.
Just last week I had a meeting with the handyman who used to work for my first landlord and I still go to the car mechanic who helped me keep my first crappy car going.
Yes I know that there are many others who I have forgotten over the years but when I think back to my first days in Brockport I am lucky to have met so many good people who helped make it easy for me to stay.

I did not know at the time but a strong foundation was being created at the time that would grow and affect my life later on.
At first I was going to stay in Brockport for three years and then move on, but things change and three years became seven, then I got tenure and soon seven years became ten, then twenty and soon I begin my thirtieth year at Brockport.

For the first 15 years working at Brockport I kept my eye on other jobs and averaged one interview a year.
I got some nice trips all over the country and visited some great colleges but also visited some that made me feel lucky to come back to Brockport.

But in 1997 things changed as I met the woman who would become my wife and I also was invited to come to Boston interview for a job at MIT.
I had always enjoyed going on the interviews but this time I was not sure and called them to say I was not interested.
They called me back and begged me to come; they all but said that I had the job.

I had really just started dating Connie and was not sure how things would develop although I knew I really liked her.
I needed to figure out what to do and decided to walk through downtown Brockport to help me think about what I should do.
It was a nice sunny day and I think I ran into everyone in town that I knew on the street that day.

Hi Gary!

     How’s it going?

          What’s up dude?

               Glad to see you.

                   Nice day, be well . . .

It was on that day that I decided to stay at Brockport and not look for other jobs any more.
I had no way of knowing what would happen, but we really never know about what path our lives will follow.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

A few years later I met the guy who took the MIT job and he told me it was a perfect job for him and he lived close enough to walk to work every day and was very happy.

I used to tell people I turned down the job because MIT is right across the Charles River from Fenway Park, and for this life-long Yankees fan it would be torture.
But in reality I guess I had figured out a bit of the meaning of life that day.

Love and Happiness.

It took me a while to while to figure out that although fame and money may be nice, its friends and family are the really are the most important things in life.
What I was looking for was already here and those people who I had met from my first days in town plus all the others I have met over the years helped make Brockport a comfortable place for me to live, even though I bitch and moan from time-to-time.

.

Barber's and The Rox

2011-06-27T14:29:00.000-07:00

As much as I enjoy working in Theatre there is always the very important down time needed to recharge and get ready for the next project.
A standard expression be those working in Theatre is that we work hard but play hard too.

The days, and nights, can be long and it is important to find a place for food, drink and good company that friendly too loud Theatre people can enjoy.

I mentioned the cast parties when I was doing Community Theatre and how the cast would sing the whole show we had just finished at a local bar or restaurant.
Every night is not a cast party but many a night after a long rehearsal groups of people go out and unwind before heading home.
So in my first days at Brockport I had to find those places that I might go for that all important first cold beer after work.

Back in the fall of 1982 the drinking age was still 18 and being a college town there were many bars to chose from.
There were enough bars back then that each one had their own distinctive atmosphere.
There were two bars that I was told about more than any others, Barber’s Bar and Grill and the Roxbury Inn.

I was told that Barber’s was where the Theatre and Dance students and other members of the Artsy crowd hung out.
I liked Barber’s and in my drinking years spent a good deal of time, and money, there.

Long and narrow it has a pressed metal ceiling and had a very unique set of beer taps.
There were four large glass globes at the counter level in which the beer would flow up from the kegs and be held until dispensed into a glass.
As the level of beer was lowered the bartender would have to open the value that sent more beer into the globes.
Unfortunately the taps no longer work and the bar has lost some of its appeal.

Barber’s always had good food and I learned to enjoy chicken wings, something that I surprisingly did not do too often when I was a student in Buffalo.
I had even had wings at the Anchor Bar, the birthplace of the Buffalo wing but it was not until I got to Brockport that they became a regular item that I would eat, especially on 10 cent wing night.

The other Brockport bar of note was the Roxbury Inn.
The Roxbury had a bit of a bad reputation, which it truly did earn, but it was still a fun place to go.

As it turned out my old roommate from Buffalo, Matt, went to high school with one of the owners and called him up just before I moved to town and told him in his best fake Mafia voice to treat me like a brother.
When I finally made it to The Rox and introduced myself to Al the owner, I was both pleased and surprised as how I was treated.
I was made to feel at home, treated as someone special and my money was never taken, well for a week or so at least, but I always left a tip.

Postcard of the old Rox, the porch is long gone.

When the owner of a bar treats someone very special so does the rest of the staff and as bartenders move from bar to bar after a short time I found myself being treated well at other bars too.

The Rox was in an old building, had a full size pool table, great music and live bands on the weekends.
It would close just a few years after I got to Brockport but I had many a good time there.
For some reason it was the bar that everyone wanted to go to at closing time.
If you were there at 11:00 PM it might seem empty, but by 12:30 you could not get in.

When the Grateful Dead played in Rochester they had a bootleg tape of the concert on by Midnight.
Other Rox stories are sure to follow.

It was during my first weeks at Brockport that I ran into John, the only guy I knew in Brockport and also a high school friend of Matt’s, coming out of The Rox.
He was happy to see me and invited to a house party he was going to.
I was eager to meet some people who were not my colleagues or students.

As it turned out it was a group of Deadheads and I am still friends with many of them 29 years later.
I was never your stereotypical Deadhead but I enjoyed hanging out with them and listening to great music.

I was only 26 and was much closer to the students’ age then most of my colleagues and I had to make a conscience effort to keep an appropriate student/teacher relationship even if I was having a beer with them after work.
With time I would make other friends away from school, but at the time it was important for me to find some friends away from Theatre.

That's Not The Way They Did it Before

2011-06-23T20:31:00.000-07:00

Jumping in at full speed was not the way wanted begin my career but that is what happened.

Teaching by day and rehearsals and performances at night for the hold over play left me little time to explore my new town or find a place to live.

That first play, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, is a bit of a blur to me.

Although it was a hold over summer show with some non-students working on it, it was still a good way for me to see how things were run at Brockport and give me a starting place from which to proceed.

I do remember one funny incident happened one night to an actress.

As she walked across the stage and someone stepped on the outer skirt of her costume and pulled it off leaving her in her petticoat.

She was completely unaware of what had happened and just kept acting until the end of the scene.

There were more than a few laughs both from the audience and crew backstage.

To the Freshmen I was just another teacher, but to the older students I was someone new, someone who they had to test and challenge.

I was only 26, just 5 years older than most of the students.

The next youngest teacher was 38 and the remaining faculty was twenty or more years older than me.

Although the staff was friendly to me it was easier for me to hang out with the students those first years.

In those first days I tried to show the students what I knew and prove to them, and myself, that I belonged there and that I now in charge.

I had to figure out what may place in this new world was going to be and did not know at the time that it would change over the years.

When I finally had time to relax and go out for a beer in town I found the bars were full of college students with a few locals and faculty types mixed in.

Not a big surprise in a college town.

The pervious Technical Director, Michael, had been well liked but when the college expanded the position they wanted someone with more formal training and experience, but of course they got me instead.

In those first weeks I had to listen many times to how Michael did it this way or that way, and that is not the way Michael did it.

I tried to remain calm but I know at least once I snapped back at a student “Well if Michael did it so well then he would still be here!”

The first play department production that I worked on with the students was Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People.

It was produced in our small Black Box or Lab Theatre and directed by Dr Cho.

It was a unit set with box beams hanging from the lighting grid and had a sliding wall section for use in several of the scenes.

An Enemy of the People, 1982

Because it was my first production of course I wanted it to go well.

I wanted to show off what I knew and prove to the faculty and students that they had hired the right guy and honestly I also wanted to prove to myself that I could do it having been out of Theatre for the past year.

As I remember it I was a bit nuts ended up doing a lot of the work on the set myself leaving the students just watching from the side handing me tools and whatever else I needed.

The set turned out nice but I quickly realized that it was the students who needed to do the work and not me.

It took a few years but I became relaxed with the fact the students in my Stagecraft class are going to be new each semester and that they will make mistakes.

I try hard to make it so that they will not make too many mistakes and have also been honest with them when the mistake may have been my fault because I gave them the wrong directions.

In those first years I would get upset when the students would measure or cut things wrong and drive up the cost of the set, but over the years I have come to accept that mistakes will always happen and that the best I can do is try to limit them.

I am never happy when things go wrong but I try to just remain calm and move on.

Of course if you ask those students who I have yelled at and called an idiot they may have a slightly different opinion, but the only way I have survived is to try to stay relaxed and less stressed when I can.

I am still working on my book; Zen and the Art of Stagecraft.

When we did An Enemy of the People twenty years later in 2002 and I was able to pull a window from our storage area from the 1982 show and reuse it.

I have used bits of that first set several times over the years.

The box beams that I made were used in several productions and the last pieces of them were thrown out during the recent renovations

The production went well except for the day that one of the actors decided to give blood for the first time and got sick on stage and throw up all over the place.

This would not be the only time actors or crew have gotten sick or have done something stupid, but it was the first time at Brockport and hinted at the fun that may lay in store for me in the coming years.

As I look back I am amazed at how many of the students from my first year at Brockport I am still in touch with, thanks in part to Facebook.

100th Blog Entry ! ! ! !

2011-06-09T18:43:00.000-07:00

When I started writing my Blog almost two years ago I did not know how long it would go on and I wondered if I would remember a sufficient amount of detail to keep it interesting and have enough to say to fill out the Blog posts.

Today this is my 100^th Blog entry and I have tried to write at least one post a week but at times it has been hard to keep up when I am busy with my current projects, teaching or playing with my granddaughter.

Some things have to come first.

So far I have really only covered 12 years of my Theatre work from high school through college, grad school and my two years working freelance in and around NYC.

I have just started to write about my time at working at SUNY Brockport.

My last Blog post was about my first week teaching so I think that I should have enough stories from the next twenty nine years to fill a few more years of Blog posts.

From time to time I have jumped out of order so I could comment on my current projects and have gone back to fix things in earlier posts as well as adding more pictures as I find them.

I have tried not to embarrass anyone else but myself.

I have admitted to my biggest blunders and dumb moves and I am sure that I will make some more again.

As I read the stats from my Blog I am amazed on how many people have read it and from how many different countries that I have readers.

In the past month I have had readers from United States, Russia, Iran, Germany, Canada, Philippines, Slovenia, United Kingdom, Hungary and many more.

I wonder why someone in Iran would read my Blog 24 times last month.

What is so interesting?

I have enjoyed writing it and remembering all the fun I have had, but I am thankful and amazed that anyone wants to read what I have to say.

When I started two years ago I never knew how much money this Blog would make and how rich I would become; Wait, I have made nothing . . . . oh well.

I could add ads to my Blog and earn 12 cents a year but I have chosen not to do that so I write my Blog just for fun.

I have joked with friends that I will have a password protected section for all of the really juicy bits, but I fear that the section would not be too big and disappointing to many, well except for that one time when I . . . . .

You will all have to wait and read on to see what happens.

New Places, New Faces

2011-06-02T13:59:00.000-07:00

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_dialect

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.

.

Off to Brockport

2011-05-27T10:19:00.000-07:00

August 1982, my life was about to change and I was not sure where the new road ahead was going to take me.
I was going through many emotions from great excitement to even fear as I pondered what was about to happen to me.
Oh course I was egger to get back to working in Theatre but not sure about teaching and moving into a new town.

I packed my few belonging; clothes, tools and drafting supplies and drove my folks van off to my new life in Brockport.
How long was it going to be?
Three years, five, ten or would I even last the first year?

By the time the college had gotten all the paperwork done I was hired after the start of the school year and I would take over my class after it had already met for a few days.
Because it was Labor Day weekend I could not move into the dorm they had arrange for me to live so I spent a night or two at the Chairman’s house.

I would spend a month living in the Stage XVI dorm complex while I looked for a place to live.
Stage XVI was a unique dorm complex that housed about 1000 students.

Stage XVI Dorm

The cluster of buildings was not like normal dorms of the day but more like apartments with two bedrooms, and a living room and kitchen.
There was also a central common building with washing machines, vending machines and a recreation area.
The idea was nice but the structure was poor.

Somehow the State Dormitory Authority bought the idea that that a building with metal siding, designed to rust, would be good for a building in Western New York.
Evidently the building designs worked well in climates like Arizona, but so good in Brockport’s wet and snowy winters.
The buildings were only nine years old when I moved in, but already they had holes rusted through the siding and the drainage around the building were poor and the ground floor apartment were subject to frequent flooding.

During the winters the exterior stairwells were often covered with ice and the students had to make a dangerous trek trying to get in and out of their rooms.
The dorms only lasted until 1990 when they were closed and torn down.

The first days of my time at Brockport are all a blur as I had many things to deal with.
I had to meet all of the staff, tour the building, move in my office, get keys and find out about my students and classes and begin work on the department’s productions.

At the time I came to Brockport they still had a summer theatre program of two productions.
There was a musical in July and another play in the beginning of August.
The August play was held over and performed again the first weekend of the new school year.

The year I came the hold over play was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
The brush-up rehearsal for the play was the night of my first day at work.
The Student crew knew what to do, I did not try to run the crew but just helped out where I could and had to jump in and help move the big turntable when its motor burnt out.

They had built a large turntable that had been used both the musical and Sherlock Holmes.
It was not built they way I would have done and after the set strike the big pieces of it sat against the wall of the Theatre for several years before I finally threw it out.
For the turntable platform they had used a honeycomb paper glued between ply and Mansonite, but unfortunately the glue that they used did not hold very well and parts of the turntable failed.
I did save the 100 castors used and still have most of them today.

Needless to say it was a very long first day and stressful day for me.

.

Things Change

2011-05-11T14:00:00.000-07:00

Working in Manhattan made it hard to hang out with friends from work because I lived on Long Island and my co-workers lived all around the NYC area: my brother lived in New Jersey, others lived up in Westchester and Connecticut and a few lived in the various boroughs of the city.
One of my co-workers lived over one hundred miles from me because I lived 40 plus miles from work and he lived almost 60 miles in the opposite direction out in New Jersey.
Needless to say we did not hang out at each other’s houses on the weekend.
As noted in an earlier post we would occasional gather at one of the local bars after work for a few drinks and then head off in our separate directions to home.

There was one Saturday when we all came back into the city to get together for a softball game in one of the ball fields in Central Park.
There is a high demand for the fields and you have to see up well in advance.
It was the 15th floor (my normal hangout) with the younger photographers and tech staff against the 18th floor and the older photographers and account reps.
My floor lost both the game and face as the older guys beat us, but it was very cool to play in Central Park.

During my year at the Photo Studio I had not given up on the idea of working in Theatre but first I needed to finish the re-writes on my master’s thesis.
I had done a quick fix to the paper and sent it in but the teachers wanted a few more changes so I decided that I would take some time off from work and get it done right.

I had only worked just over 11 months at the Photo Studio and was not yet entitled to vacation time but I went into see my boss and told that I was going to take two weeks off anyway and that if he wanted me back after I was done I would like to come back, but if he did not want to hold my job that was fine with me.
It told me that it would be fine and I went home to work on my thesis.

I made several trips to SUNY Stony Brook to use their library and re-read some of the books that I had used back in Michigan.
I rented an electric and re-wrote the 60 page paper and sent it in.
While I was off from work I saw that the American Theatre Association was having their conference in the city and I went the job placement service that was part of it.

I interviewed with several schools including SUNY College at Brockport.
I thought the interview went well, but you never know.
As it turned out Seton Hall University had the table right next to Brockport’s and they talked to the Seton Hall people about me.

At first they said: “Oh you don’t want him, we had to let him go, he didn’t work out”.

Thankfully the man who had just interviewed me seemed puzzled and asked if they were talking about the same person.
It turns out they were talking about the guy who they brought in instead of me.

When they realized they had made a mistake the Seton Hall people said: “Gary was great, we liked him and were sorry we hired the other guy”.

So a few days later I got a call from Brockport telling me that they wanted me but had to work out some money issues.
I did not know it at the time but Brockport was going through major cuts and had retrenched (cut) four departments.

Currently things are a bit scary here with new budget cuts, but (knock on wood) no departments have been cut at Brockport as with some other SUNY schools.
SUNY Albany plans to cut their Theatre program, not good.

A few days later I got another call offering me the job.
I had been to Brockport twice while at Buffalo.
I came out with some friends to see a play, Our Town, and a jazz concert with the Sam Rivers Trio featuring Dave Holland on bass.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_Q1c60JoaM

Sam River’s music is based in Bebop but in 1977 he was too much into the Free Jazz style for me, but Dave Holland is a great Bass player and I am glad I saw the concert.

Brockport’s Theatre Department had a good reputation and I thought that it would be a good starter job.
What the heck, I would give it a try, maybe three years or so and I would move on before I was 30.

If you want to make God laugh tell him your plans.

Well things changed, this is the end on my 29th year at Brockport and I now am 55.
There are many more interesting stories to come.

I never did go back to the Photo Studio after working on my thesis.
I called my supervisor and told him I had taken another job.
He was cool about it and even got me a week of vacation pay in my last paycheck.

A big change was ahead for me and I had to make plans to move on very short notice.

.

Fun in New York City

2011-04-28T18:14:00.000-07:00

Of course working in New York City means I got to play in New York City.
With my commute taking almost two hours each way I often got home after 8pm so if I wanted to anything; have a drink or go to a store I would stay in the city and do it before I went home.
I did use the long train rides to catch up on books I had wanted to read, but more often than not the time was used to catch up on sleep.

Some nights I would have a drink and something to eat with my brother and other co-workers at a great old bar just a half of block from work on 18th Street; Old Town Bar.

http://www.oldtownbar.com/

The bar used to be featured on the opening of the David Lettermen show back when it was on NBC in the 1980’s.
A few times I got to go to another classic bar, McSorley’s Ale House just 10 blocks further south in Greenwich Village.
I went there a few times and remember one time meeting up with friends from college for a great reunion and maybe one or two ales too many, but a still a good time.

http://www.mcsorleysnewyork.com/

It was a men’s only bar until 1970 and does not serve beer, wine or mixed drinks; just ale, light or dark.
Also it had great food; big sandwiches with classic stone ground mustard.

There was always plenty to see and do in the area around work and I would often come back late from lunch, but never got caught.
If my boss was looking for me I could always tell him I was working on the other floor or out buying paint.
One time I was having so much fun looking around the Strand Bookstore that I was over an hour late getting back from lunch.

http://www.strandbooks.com/

The Strand is a huge used bookstore with several floors of interesting books and is still going strong.

Of course many of the places I used to frequent have closed or changed in the past 30 years, but with Old Town and McSorley’s, both with over one hundreds year in business, some things go on and on and look the same as when I was there.
We had a tradition of going to the Lone Star Café for drinks anytime someone was leaving the Photo Studio.
Great chili and music, but it has been closed for twenty years now.

There were always many distractions and places to see in NYC.
If I had time I would walk to Penn Station just to see what there was to see along the way.
Sometimes I would go a few blocks North of Penn Station to Macy’s and Gimble’s and many other little shops and restaurants of all descriptions.
One day I took a subway up to Rockefeller Center to see the Big Christmas Tree and ran into several friends from College, one from Buffalo and one from Michigan.

It seemed that I would see someone I knew at least twice a month.
One day while coming down an escalator at Macy’s I saw a girl that I knew went to Buffalo.
As I rode down I realized that I did recognized her from several years of seeing her walking around the Buffalo campus, but I had never meet her and thought it would be too weird to go up to her so I just kept walking by.

A few times I would run into famous people on the street.
One day as I was coming around the corner of a building near Union Square I literally ran into Andy Warhol.
He was a kind of creepy looking guy with a very odd looking entourage following close behind.

There were a few other famous faces here and there, but I usually did not care, and like other New Yorkers I just would walk on by and maybe sneak a look.
I had not given up on Theatre and would go back into the city on the weekends to see some Broadway shows.
Of course I got a call for a Theatre job soon after I had started working at the Photo Studio.
It was odd because I had never sent the theatre a copy of my resume.
I never found out how they got my name, but I had committed to working at the Studio for a little while and wanted to save a little money before I dove back into the Theatre world.

But as always things change and plans are adjusted.

.

Brockport Alumni, part 1 of many

2011-04-19T08:23:00.000-07:00

Current projects have kept my away from my blog for a while, but fear not as I still have a great deal to write here.
Recently we had four successful alumni from the 1970’s come back and give a talk about their work in Hollywood.
These guys were students at Brockport before my time but after 29 years of teaching I will of course run into some of my former students from time to time.

Stu Krieger ’73, William Fichtner ’78, Paul Pape ’74, and Jesse Goins ’74

http://www.brockport.edu/newsbureau/1597.html

I was working with my student the next day when two of the alumni stopped to walk around the theatre a bit more.

We talked about what was going on at the college today and I was able to show them a few posters I had from their days here at Brockport.

My favorite part of the visit was when asked to take a photo with me, just like you see when somebody runs into a famous person on the street.

Most times it is not an arrange visit like Friday’s but just an unannounced surprise.
Just this semester I have seen and half a dozen alumni, a couple each from the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s.

Recently I ran into a guy from almost twenty years ago in Wal-Mart with his two kids.
He had taken my stagecraft class, I think he was an Art major, and went on to have several different professions but after being a general carpenter and now is building guitars.
He said he learned the basics back in my stagecraft class and when he was looking for a new career path the skills he had learned in my class helped him choose his new path.
I know that I do not turn out master carpenters from my class, but it was nice to hear that he felt what he did learn helped him transition to his new career.

Of course many students graduate (or drop out) and I never see or hear from again but I am always surprised by how many I do hear from.
The alumni always seem to appear in groupings over the year: around Christmas time or during the summer when they are vacationing and just happen to stop by.
Some do make special trips just to see what has happened since they left.
Many have come by recently because we have gone through a major building renovation and they want to see the changes.

A few years ago we did have an alumni come back and he performed his one man show and talked with a group of current students about working in NYC for the past twenty five years.
I will have pleanty more stories about my former students in the comming blogs.

My current project is Wait Until Dark a play we did here as part of our summer season over twenty years ago.

http://www.brockport.edu/newsbureau/1590.html

I will be returning back to the re-telling of my days working in NYC next and how it was that I came to work in Brockport.

A Day in the Life of the Photo Studio

2011-03-26T09:54:00.000-07:00

Being in NYC each day was more exciting then working at the Photo Studio and most days I had more adventures before and after work then I did at work.
After two weeks I had already built most variations of the standard set ups a number of times and only once and while after that would I do anything really different.
The junior photographers did most of the table top shots and set them up themselves.

Cans of soup, piles of towels or a spread of some exciting “New” or “Improved” products across a table, WILD.

One of my favorite products was a painted wooden mock-up of a new Game Boy type hand held toy that had not even been made yet, but because the Christmas catalogues were made in June and July, things were planed ahead and the manufacturer was hoping that the toy would be ready by December.
You might think it would be hard to get Christmas decorations in the summer, but remember this was NYC and you can get anything you want at any time, you may have to look a little but when you find it you know that you pay a lot for it.

For one project the designer had me take a long subway ride out to far the ends of Brooklyn to find a place that would sell us old telephone poles that we had cut down to 3 or 4 feet.
They were to be used as part of a dock set and without a problem they were cut and delivered the next week.
The pole pieces might seem a little odd to people looking at what was coming into a building on Park Ave, but it was the 12 foot row boat that was truly fun to watch as the movers tried to get it in the freight elevator and up to the 15th floor.

During a busy period and needing more room for a project, the Studio rented an empty floor in our building to put up a large set that was too big for our regular space.

I did not do a lot of work in the fashion studios as most shots were simply done in front of any number of colored seamless paper roles that the Studio had.
For one special shot they paid to have 6 inch squares of gold leaf glued on a 4 x 8 piece on Masonite.
We all joked that it looked like Ring Ding wrappers (back then they were still wrapped in foil) and that it would have been a lot cheaper to do.

A lot of photo tricks that the photographers did back then can be done in Photoshop these days, but in 1981 we still had to do some things the hard way or sometimes maybe the crazy way.
One standard trick was doing double exposures with a background slide in the camera which resulted in any kind of image they wanted outside of windows.

For one shot in the fashion studio I was asked to put up a wall with a fireplace in it.
Real wood logs were in the fireplace sitting on a piece of plywood over the carpeting that was part of the set.
During the actual shot I was asked to stand behind the wall spraying lighter fluid down on the logs that had been painted with rubber cement and set afire.
For a few seconds there would be a big whoosh of flames, the photos taken and the fire quickly put out.
I was told that they did this all the time and that the fire they had the previous year was not all that bad.

It was not too surprising when the company comptroller gave me the details about the payoffs to the fire and other building inspectors and of course it was the UPS delivery man who was the local bookie and handled the football pool.
I did win twenty bucks one week.

I would need to go to the comptroller’s office almost every day to get purchase orders to buy paint or other items for the various shots, all of which had to be assigned to a specific account for each of the clients.
People seemed to gather in that office, there was always a lot of goofing off there and we often played darts.
Everyone would put up a dime on the table and take a shot and whoever was closest won the dimes.
One day while a bunch of us were playing darts the company president walked in and almost got hit by a dart.
Instead of yelling at us to get back to work he said:
“I’m sorry, I’ll come back later”
It is no wonder that the company had problems.

The fashion models were an interesting group.
The women always came in sweats with their high up or pulled back and then would spend an hour or more with the stylists in the dressing rooms and then come out for 10 minutes of work in front of the camera.
The male models always came in well dressed, with great tans.
I remember way day in the elevator hearing one model tell another that he had just gotten back from Greece where he had been working on his tan and what a great time he had there.
This was a time before tanning salons, tuff life.

There was an area of the Studio that had all the headshot books from the different modeling agencies in the City and each model had her own page with several photos of her in different poses and looks.
Account reps would work with clients to pick out several choices for each set-up.
The rep would then call the agencies and see who was available.
“I’ll take blonde number 15, 28 and 34 and brunette numbers 23, 57 and 109”.

One time we were doing a towel shot where the model was to stick her upper body through a hole in the table and wave her arms at all the pretty merchandise.
The model got to the Studio, saw the set-up and said “I don’t do towels” and left.

The junior photographers were always more than willing to make a few extra dollars to work as hand models when a shot called for it.
We did bring in a special “Leg Model” for one shot.
Leg and arm models were usually a bit older, maybe in their 30’s, but still had great limbs and the good ones always had work.

Watching a fashion shoot is fun because they will do anything to make the clothes fit and look right on the model.
They will cut a suit coat right up the back or use spring clamps to pull fabric tight.
Weights might be added to the hems of skirts to pull them down just right.

Food shots are also surprising in what they do.
Lard is sometimes used in place of ice cream and turkeys are basted in dish soap and cooked just enough to give then just the right color and texture.
There was a story that someone tried to eat a turkey after a shot and got very sick.
We all liked it when there was a shot with fresh fruit and veggies because everyone got to take some home after the shot was done.
Like in Theatre, the result only has to look right from the front and point of view of the camera lens and if is not seen then it may not be there and products might be (usually were) enhanced to look good.

LIRR

2011-03-20T10:13:00.000-07:00

Commuting every day by train was a new experience for me.

The trip took an hour and a half each way plus another 20 minutes by bus or subway to get from Pennsylvania Station to where the Photo Studio was on Park Ave.
I got up each day just before 6:00 AM and rushed to get the 6:20 Train; we would cram onto the old diesel engine train and stand for an half an hour until we got to Babylon where we changed to the newer electric trains.
With everyone else I would run to get a seat for the next hour in to City.
I had become a Dashing Dan, a regular commuter on the Long Island Railroad.

If I had time I would get a coffee and butter roll from a coffee truck (roach coach) at the train station.
Once I got to work two hours later I would stop in to coffee shop on the ground floor of our building for another coffee and a toasted bran or corn muffin and then go upstairs, punch in and then wait for something to do.
If I did not have any work leftover from the day before I would wait in the little shop/office drink my coffee and read the paper until the designer and account reps came in and figured out what needed to be done that day.
There were days when I was never called to do anything until after lunch and just hung out.
There are people who have commuted 30 years or more on the LIRR, but in my year I experienced many different things.
Of course we were often late for any number of reasons: Rain, Snow, Ice, Wind, and at times it seemed that even Sunshine on a clear day would cause delays.

There were times that the train hit something on the tracks, equipment failures, a fire on the train and someone having a fatal heart attack in the smoking car.
You do not want to be at a train station after someone has been hit by a train.
I did not make it to work that day.

One the same day that someone died on my train and i was late to work, two other people were late getting to work because someone had a heart attack on their train or subway.

I tried to make good use of my almost four hours on the train each day.
Sleep was always welcome but I would often read books or any of the number of newspapers left on the train coming home at night .
It was reading an article in one of those newspapers about public school districts banning certain books that made me want to read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and then most of his other books.

After a short time I could even read while riding on the subway and remember laughing out loud at parts of Vonnegut’s God Bless You Mr. Rosewater.

http://www.vonnegut.com/index.asp

Too many nights my diner was a slice or two of pizza and beer I would pick up running through Penn Station to catch my train.

I was aware of class snobbery on the train when I would come home with a little sawdust or paint on my work clothes.
The Wall Street suits did not like to sit with us Blue Collar Workers.
Friday nights in the summer was always fun because in addition the regular riders the Boys of Summer would be going out to their summer houses on Fire Island.
They would have bags of groceries, some little dog with bad skin and sometimes even one of their mothers came with them.
The only time I saw all of the classes mixing on the train were those guys standing between cars smoking some “Wacky Tabacci”.

I remember one time that I saw somebody that I rode with all the time off the train and I could not place who they were or where I knew them from.
It was an interesting time, but I glad that I had only to do it for one year and also very happy that I was no longer riding the train when the next year there was someone taking random shots at people in Penn Station.

My time in the train was interesting but the Photo Studio would offer many more stories.

Vogue-Wright Photographic Studio

2011-03-16T20:40:00.000-07:00

I had been out of Grad school for just a year and had worked various free-lance Theatre jobs in NYC, New Jersey, New Hampshire and on Long Island, but at the end of August 1981 I started working at Vogue-Wright Photographic Studios in NYC.
My brother, a photographer in the Studio, had told me that things were not getting done on time because the carpenter that they had was just a bit too laid back and not a take charge kind of guy so I had sold the president of the company that I was just what the Studio needed.

I was brought in to add a little more planning and construction expertise to Studio and worked with the company designer to figure out how to build the sets needed for the wide variety of photo shoots that the Studio did.
I do not know what they told the other carpenter, I was never really his boss, but the designer would talk to me about the different projects and I would pass it on to him.
He did not seem to care and did what he was asked to do, more or less, often less.

There was a lot for me to learn about how things were normally done.
The Studio was on two floors of our building with the 15th floor being where most of the full size room sets where put up and the 18th floor had the offices and Fashion Studios.
We did some unique shots but most were simple table top set ups with seamless paper, fashion shots in front of walls and many room shots.
The JC Penny catalog was our biggest client, but with did work for Brooks Brothers, Spiegel, A&P Food Markets and numerous other small shots.

The typical set-up was just two intersecting walls, with a gap for lighting and sometimes window.
The designer would pick a paint color that matched one of the highlight colors in the product that they were selling.
We seemed to do an endless supply of bedroom set-ups with every color and pattern of linens that they sold.

We used hard covered, Hollywood or TV style flats.
Traditional Theatre flats were made with 1x3 pine lumber frames with canvas skins.
Hard cover flats use the same 1x3 but attached on edge and covered with ¼” ply back in 1981, but today Luan Ply is used.

It was at the Studio that I started using Drywall Screws for the first time.
The screws had only been around for a few years and had been designed for attaching Drywall (Sheetrock) to metal studs.
The original screw teeth were fine and often would pull out of wood, plus the steel used was brittle and would easily sheer.
The birth of the cordless electric drill, and that everyone is always looking to make things easier, the use of Drywall Screws caught on fast in both Theatrical and General Construction.
As the use of the screws caught on, manufactures made improvements in both the steel used to make them and the screw threads.
If you go to Home Depot or Lowes most of the screws you would find are called deck screws and it is hard to find the original style meant for steel studs.

Back when I first started working in Theatre if we wanted to use screws we would have to drive them in by hand or use a Yankee Screwdriver.
My accident with a Yankee Screwdriver in High School I documented in a previous post.
Whenever I think about it I have to stop and find the small scar on my arm.

It is still there.

When I took the job I was not sure how long I would stay there, I did not want to give up on Theatre, but it was a good paying job with good benefits and it was the best offer I had at the time.

I will chronicle some of the more interesting events that happened to me over the next year in the Studio, around the City and even on the train ride to and from work each day.

.

Di and Da

2011-03-03T18:52:00.000-08:00

The big story in the summer of 1981 was not the plays that I worked on at Seton Hall University but the wedding of a pretty 19 year old girl to a goofy looking future king.
I watched some of the “Wedding of the Century” on a grainy black white TV in the Theatre office.
Now their son is getting married this spring in another “Wedding of the Century”.
I wish him better luck then his parents.

The final play of the summer was the Tony Award winning play Da by Hugh Leonard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_(play)

It is a memory play set just after the funeral of the main character and as Charlie comes home he finds the Ghost or memory of his father is still at the home.
The play is flash backs to different moments in Charlie’s life growing up that involved his father.
My favorite scene is one in which Charlie is talking with a neighborhood girl who will “go down back” with the boys.
Just as she agrees to go Charlie’s father comes by and ruins the moment.
“Oh, she's a fine girl, from a good family” Da tells Charlie.
Charlie’s introduction into manhood would have to wait for another day.

The lead character of Da was played by the Director/Department Chair and Charlie by Rudy Hornish, a local actor who had just finished working on the film Ordinary People.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0395183/

Rudy told a story about how after he won his Oscar for directing the film, Robert Redford sent certificates of thanks, with mini Oscars printed on them, to everyone who had worked on the film.

They loved their Irish Theatre at Seton Hall and one of the directors who was there in 1981 is still working there today.
http://www.shu.edu/academics/artsci/seton-hall-theatre/

In addition to the summer job I had also applied for a full time job working at the University.
The interview for the full time job was during my second week there.
They gave the job to someone with more experience but at the end of the summer, just before I left, the Chairman told me that he enjoyed working with me and maybe he hired the wrong guy.
As it turned he was right and the other guy was fired before the end of the first year.
They had their chance but I was moving on to other things by then.

My older brother was working as a Photographer in NYC and told me that the studio that he worked for was looking for someone like me to be like a technical director building sets for the different photo set ups.
I took a trip into the city and met with the president of the company and sold him on the idea that I was just what he needed to save his studio, or at least make it run smoother.
They offered me the job at $250 a week plus medical and dental benefits.
This was about $50 more than the junior Photographers starting wage so I guess they really wanted me.

So at the end of the summer, with no other leads on Theatre jobs, I started working full time in Manhattan at Vogue Wright Photographic Studios on Park Avenue near Union Square.
Living back with me parents on Long Island, I would commute on the Long Island Railroad for the next year.

Those train rides alone could fill another blog, but highlights of my adventures in the Photo World are soon to follow.

Candide and Shadow of a Gunman

2011-02-23T16:30:00.000-08:00

The Theatre at Seton Hall University was the only truly Theatre-in-the-round that I have ever worked in.
I had recently worked in the Guggenheim Museum, and although the building is round, the Theatre was set up in a normal proscenium style and when you were in it you did not sense that the building was round.
In college we had gone over designing in the round as part of my scene design classes, but Seton Hall’s Theatre was a real challenge.

I knew what to do in theory, but made sure that I talked with the directors who had already worked the space for their advice and insights before I started my designs.
The acting space was of course round, sunken down below that seat level about 18 inches and maybe 20 to 24 feet across, with entrances that went under the seats at the twelve and six o’clock positions.

Ground Plan for Candide

For the musical Candide I used three platforms, a center unit with two side ones at the 4 and 10 O’clock positions.
There were also to small platform/steps units that came in from the house level down to the floor level at the 2 and 8 O’clock positions.

Set and Lighting Design - CANDIDE 1981

There was very little other scenery; simple stools, boxes, props and a few cutouts.
The lighting was as colorful as I could make it.
The play is fun and everyone seemed to enjoy it.

Problems?
Oh course.

On the day we were to open the play I was told that the Theatre was going to be used as part of freshmen orientation.
I went to yell at the Dean, who as it turned out was a priest.
For a moment I had forgotten that Seton Hall was a Catholic University.

The second play of the summer was Shadow of a Gunman by Sean O’Casey, an Irish play set during “the Troubles.”
It is not one of his best of his plays, but the cast did a good job with it.
The simple set required only a single room in a city tenement apartment.

I first designed what I thought that the room would look like without regard to the fact that we were in the round.
It seemed that walls would not really be an option, but I figured out a way to use them anyway.
I used painted Styrofoam panels about 4 inches thick that followed the outline of the ground plan and they were cut in an irregular line ranging in height from 12 to 24 inches.
I made working doors that were cut just above the door knobs.
For the window I made a real double hung window but the top half was just a 1 x 2 without all of the trim and molding and some of the audience would view the show through.

We only used one of the stage’s entrances and I had the actors come in and walk a quarter of the way around the edge of the Theatre before they came to the apartment door.
The director added business for the actors to do as they came and went from the apartment that added to the understanding of the character’s motivations and actions.
Not one my favorite plays, but I was happy with the results.

One afternoon one of the actors in the play stopped by the Theatre and I got to take a ride in his classic Model T Ford.
Although in the Model T, a few of us did take a couple of other road trips that summer.
My assistant and I went to visit my friend Randy from college who was working in a nearby Theatre and another time some of us decided to go into Manhattan for one last late night drink because the bars in New Jersey closed too early for our taste.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, but because we never found the bar that one of us was looking for it really was a waste of time as we settled for a quick drink in some random dive.

As at most Theatres that I have worked; people at Seton Hall liked to work hard and play hard too.
It is most enjoyable when you like the people you are working with and can have a good time together whether you are working or having a drink after a show.

Festival of Ten, VII

2011-02-20T18:12:00.000-08:00

I enjoy writing this blog about my past adventures in Theatre, but current projects always take precedence over reminisces of the past.

Link to : Festival of Ten - VII

Our next production opens this Friday but I already have been working on my next entries and will post them soon.

The Festival of Ten is a production of ten 10-minute plays that we select from about 400 that we have receive from playwrights all over America and many from other countries as well.

Yesterday after just after we started working on the set and lights there was a campus wide blackout at the college that lasted 18 hours.
Of course it put us behind for today’s technical rehearsal, but my student designers have been doing a good job.
We will have to push a little tomorrow the catch up, but everything should be done and the show will open on time.
There are often problems and other surprises that occur putting on a play and for those who having been reading my blog it should not come as a big shock.

Stay tune and I will be going back to the Summer of 1981 next time.

Summer Theatre in New Jersey

2011-01-28T20:15:00.000-08:00

In between looking for work I took time to get together with 3 college friends to see the Grateful Dead at the Nassau Coliseum on May 6, 1981.
I thought it was a pretty good show and later it was made into a selection of the “Dick’s Picks” series of CDs.

http://www.amazon.com/Dicks-Picks-Vol-13-Uniondale/dp/B00005V8PM

You can buy it and check it out for yourself.
Another show that I went to back in 1977 was made into Volume 34 of the series and I would also recommend that you give it a listen.

http://www.amazon.com/Dicks-Picks-34-Community-Rochester/dp/B001W2FDOI

I was surprised to see a photo in the liner notes that could be me, it really is too small to tell, but I like to think it is me standing there grooving to the Dead at the show in Rochester.

Although I enjoyed working at Theatre Three I needed to look for a better paying full-time job.
I landed a job designing the sets and lights for three summer productions at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey.
The job was just for the summer but they were also looking for someone to take over full time in the fall so I jumped at the chance to go there.
The productions were the musical Candide, Shadow of a Gunman by Sean O’Casey and Da by Hugh Leonard.

I had worked on the first play of the summer, Candide, five years before at Gateway Playhouse so I was familiar with the play but I was not ready for the fact that it was a true Theatre-in-the-Round.
Quickly I had to learn how to design both sets and lights in the round.
It was typical Summer Theatre with limited money, crew and time but it went well and I was happy with the results.

The school had arranged a room in a local home own by an old Polish lady who had been renting rooms to young college men since the early 1950’s.
I was told that the room I had in the attic had once been rented to local New Radio DJ “Cousin Brucie” back when he was in school or working but his bio says he went to NYU, so I really do not know.
In any case he was once one of the most powerful DJs in America and was the man who introduced the Beatles at their first Shea Stadium concert in 1965.

Unlike in New Hampshire, my assistant actually worked with me even though he too had a part in the first play.
There were also a couple of young interns and the production manager who helped from time to time.
It was a nice place to work mostly in part because it was not minus 20 outside.

The cast and crew were a friendly group and we ended many days at one of the local restaurants, most often “Bunny’s Pizza and Booze” which is still there, but they dropped the “Booze” part of the name.

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?hl=en&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS355US356&wrapid=tlif129574825140310&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=bunny's+pizza+south+orange&fb=1&gl=us&hq=bunny's+pizza&hnear=South+Orange,+NJ&cid=17215325486080447497

Being a Catholic University there were not too many naked people running about as had happened in previous theatres, but somehow we still managed to have a good time that summer.

As with most of my experiences working in Theatre, I have fond memories of working at Seton Hall that summer and some stories about what happened both on and off stage to follow soon.

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THEATRE THREE, Port Jefferson, NY

2011-01-17T21:42:00.000-08:00

Going back and looking at my tax records, I made less than $500 in 1980; at least that is what I paid taxes on.
So in working on a couple of rock shows in Ann Arbor, several freelance jobs in NYC and my month in working in New Hampshire I took home less than $500.
It seems that I was not going to get rich working in Theatre.

There were not too many places hiring in January when I got back to New York.
I read the trade newspapers and sent out more resumes and waited to see what would come up.
In the middle of February 1981 I was hired to design the lights for a production of the Threepenny Opera.

I do not remember how I found out about the job as I had been looking for theatre working in NYC and this was on Long Island close to where I lived.
My former employer supplied the lighting equipment to the Theatre and may have told about the job, but I am not sure.
Theatre Three is in Port Jefferson on the north shore of Long Island about 20 miles from my family’s house in Sayville.

http://www.theatrethree.com/

I both excited and a bit worried about designing the lights as it had been almost a year and a half since I had last deigned the lighting for a play.
I had designed several sets and had done mostly set construction work during that time.
The building was long and narrow and had been a Movie Theatre at one time and there was also a Cabaret Theatre in the lower level.
It seemed that the bar in the Cabaret was a popular place for off-duty cops and nurses to hang out and drink.
One day when walking through the bar one of the cops thought I was carrying a gun, but it was just my new Buck knife on my belt.

The Threepenny Opera, 1981

It turned out that I worked with director before on several productions by the Sayville Musical Workshop
and one of the actors in the play, Brent Erlanson, had played Bobby in the SMW production of Company and I was saddened to learn that he passed away recently.

They must have liked me as I was hired to design both the set and lights for the next production of Table Manners, one of the three plays in Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests trilogy.
Unfortunately I do not have any photos of the play, but it is the only play that I have worked on that was reviewed by the New York Times.
The review was so-so:

http://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/03/nyregion/theater-in-review-table-manners-offrs-meal-in-itself.html

Of course my name is not in the review, it never mentions the set or that they were even are on a stage.
There is nothing in the review for me to say: “Hay, I Did That!”
Oh well, maybe next time.

The construction staff were not trained “Theatre” people but local carpenters who used 2 x 4’s and sheetrock to build the walls on the set.
I guess it made sense for them to build it that way as they were able to use the skills of the people who they had available and saved money doing it.
The finished set looked fine and cost less than if they had used 1 x 3’s and muslin, the common building materials used in theatre at that time.
It would not have worked if there had been multiple sets or were trying to fly scenery in and out.

While at Theatre Three I also did the lighting for some kind of fashion show/benefit to help some good cause or another.
One of my recently graduated students currently works at Theatre Three.
I am happy to know that they are still there and doing well.

I was disappointed to learn that The Airport Playhouse, another Long Island Theatre that I once worked in, closed this past December.

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Leaving New Hampshire

2011-01-14T10:20:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed the people I worked with in New Hampshire, but it was the working conditions were tough.
As I have in the past I have gone through programs and have looked up some of the people I have worked with to see where they are now and what they are doing.
As noted in a past post, George, the actor who played Scrooge is still living and working in Manchester.
He was a good guy and made those from out of town feel welcome.

I found out that the extra stage manager who they let design the lights is currently works at Lincoln Center in NYC.
Although he was not able to help too much in the shop I liked my assistant and we shared the experience of living in the “welfare hotel” and I was glad he was there when ever the “creepy guy from across the hall” was around.
Besides talking about him seeing the Beatles we talked about many different things including the poet Richard Brautigan whose new book The Tokyo-Montana Express I was reading at the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Brautigan

He is best known for his book Trout Fishing in America.
I enjoyed the book but I think I enjoy the folk group that took its name even better.
I have seen them perform live twice and would recommend both their music and Brautigan’s books.

http://www.troutmusic.com/

I found out that my assistant, Steve Witting, did do a little more technical theatre but turned to the Dark Side and became an actor full time.
Some of you may remember him as a Burt on TV in The Hogan Family in the late 1980’s.
He has done a number of movies and was recently in Shutter Island and on Boardwalk Empire on HBO.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0937059/

A year later I would run into staff Technical Director who ran the Palace Theatre while I was walking through Madison Square Park in NYC.
At the time I could not remember his name or where we had worked together but just had a general “Hi how are you doing” conversation.
It took a while but I finally remembered him hours later.
I found that he does lighting work in the Boston and surrounding New England area.

Someplace I still have a pair of scissors that I accidently took from the Theatre when I left.
Unfortunately I never got any production photos of the play so the scissors are my only memento of my time working in New Hampshire.

Just as I had done a few months before, I moved back to Long Island and begin again to look for work.
It was January 1981 and things were a bit slow at first but soon they would pick up and the next chapter in my adventures would begin.

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It's 20 Below Zero, What Could Go Wrong?

2011-01-04T18:09:00.000-08:00

I do not remember that there was much of a set for A Christmas Carol, just a few pieces to suggest some locations and lots of fog.
Although they can be a problematic; we used a large Dry Ice Fog machine that spread out a nice two foot thick layer of fog all over the stage floor.
There was one day when something was different; the temperature, humidity or a door open some place, when the fog came out of the hose it just stayed together, ran across the stage floor and over the edge into the orchestra pit.
The next day it was back to normal and we never did find out what made it do that.

Someone had the idea to have the Ghost of Christmas Present make his first entrance flying in from above in a large Santa-like chair.
It did not seem all that safe but many ropes and two batten pipe that were tied together were used to make it work.
It was hard to keep it all in balance as a large actor got in and out of the chair and we had to stop it from zooming up and smashing the lights or other scenery above the stage.
A hundred pound plus sandbag was used to balance the weight when the actor was not in the chair.
During the intermission the chair was lowered, sandbag was removed as the actor sat in the chair and then flown up and out of sight.
It took four of us at the fly rail to keep the chair from flying up out of control as the actor, and his weight, stepped off of the chair.
Although it was an accident waiting to happen, the audience loved as the chair was lowered in.
Fortunately there was never a problem with the chair.

One night there was a robbery from the dressing rooms when someone snuck in during a performance and stole some of the actors’ wallets and a gold watch from George, the actor playing Scrooge.
George was from the area and went out after the show, down the alley behind the theatre and found where the thief tossed the empty wallets.
One of the actresses was fortunate in that she had put most of her recently cashed paycheck behind one of the dividers in her wallet and it was still there when it was recovered.
No one else was to be as lucky.

We had ten or more of shows before Christmas and several more after a day or two off.
I rode down to New York City with someone from the company and took a train out to Long Island to spend the holiday with my family, but had to fly back up to New Hampshire on Christmas night.
Working holidays is the price one pays for all the “Glory” of working in Show Biz.

I had gotten a new Buck knife from my brother for Christmas and put it in my bag to check, but when I got to the airport I found out that it was a little twelve seat twin engine plane and there were no place for checked bags and I had to carry it on with me.
I told the guard at the check point about the knife and she did not care and said to have a nice trip.
Ah the good old days of 1980 when things were a little easier.

The flight was fine but it seemed to be even colder than before.
I was concerned that the next play was to open in less than three weeks and we had not yet had a production meeting.
The set that I designed was just small bits pieces of scenery and although it worked for A Christmas Carol I did not know how I was going to design and build the set for Oklahoma! by myself in such a short time.
I was not going to be able to paint a backdrop or two in the small shop or build all of the required elements needed for the musical and it might be too late to rent a set.

On the day of the last show of A Christmas Carol I had decided to quit and go back to New York.
I was cold, I had been lied to about many things and just wanted to go back and start again.
As I walked up the stairs to the Theatre office I could see people running about and sensed that something was wrong.
The sprinkler system had frozen and burst the pipes and flooded the theatre with thousands of gallons of water.
Water poured down from the ceiling into the house left box seats and then spilling over into the orchestra pit and flooding the dressing rooms.
The dummer was near tears as his hand-made wooden drum kit was floating in the water.

The last performance was cancelled and we struck the set.
The company had planned to do the next show in a concert format at a local high school and told me that I would not be needed.
They gave me two weeks severance pay.
It took me a day or two to pack up and arrange to go back home.
As I walked past the rehearsal studio a few blocks from the Theatre I saw that there had been a burst pipe there as well, as a river of ice was coming down the stairs and out the front door.

My last night there I packed up my things and sat in my cold room watching the ball drop on New Year’s Rockin' Eve and when it hit the bottom all I could think was:

“Fuck You Dick Clark!”

So there I was at 8:00 AM on January 1st, waiting in the cold to take a bus back to New York, thinking about what was in store for me in 1981 and beyond.

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A Christmas Carol, December 1980

2011-01-02T14:30:00.000-08:00

For those of us who work in Theatre we all know that many of the things that go wrong behind the scenes are never seen by the audience.
Although I had many issues and problems putting together the set for A Christmas Carol, the production looked good and the audience enjoyed it.
I enjoyed it and liked the original songs written for the show.
It was put together like a summer stock show, quick, cheap and with most of the people hired in NYC with one popular local actor staring as Scrooge.

I found out that the actor who played Scrooge, George F. Piehl, still works in the area and has his own Theatre Company and recently celebrated 34 years of performing on stage at the Palace Theatre with a review show back in September.

http://www.stageoneproductions.net/

As I had noted earlier, things were not quit what I expected when I got to New Hampshire.
The cast and crew were mostly college students or recent grads like me and the show was put together in just a few weeks.
So when I got to town I found out a few things were not as they had told me in NYC, I had no crew; the shop was small, unheated and had few tools.
The budget, if there was one, was very tight and for most of the set I would pull and adapt set pieces from their stock.

I was told that I could charge paint and other items at the store right next to the Theatre, but when I tried to charge the first time I got yelled at by the owner.
“How dare you try to charge more when you guys already own us a lot for the last show!!!”
I apologized and explained that I was new, but then I went and yelled at the producer and told him to never put me in that position again.

I cannot find the right words to tell you how bad the rooming house really was.
The owner of the house ran a local photo shop and when I stopped by one day to complain about the lack of heat, he suggested that I leave to oven on with the door open.
It truly was a “Welfare Hotel” mostly filled with old men except for myself, my assistant and the “Creepy guy from across the hall”.
I was told that the “Creepy guy from across the hall” had just gotten out of jail, something about a murder but no proof.
One night when I came home from work I found blood outside his door and that the door was full of marks and dents.
Seems that the “Creepy guy from across the hall” had beaten the shit out of his girlfriend who was trying to kick in his door, but when the police came she begged to stay with him.
Ah, true love.

I was a bit apprehensive one day when the “Creepy guy from across the hall” knocked on my door and asked for my help.
It seems that one of the old men who lived down the hall had fallen out of bed and the “Creepy guy from across the hall” needed my help to pick him up and put him back in bed.

The long walk to and from the Theatre was extra hard when it hit 20 below zero, before the wind-chill factor was added, and I had to stop over for a while in the apartment of a co-worker and warm up a bit before I tried to make it back to my place.
I had to pull ice chunks out of my bread.
Fun.

One night while walking home alone in the cold and snow some crazy guy was following me, he was dancing in the road, bouncing about and acting, well crazy.
He did not worry me too much except when he ran ahead of me and down the side street that I had to take to get home and I decided that it might be wise to take out my new Buck knife and have it ready just in case, but I luckily did not need it.
I have never felt that I needed to have a weapon ready before or since that night; even I was staying at my brother’s place back in the summer of 1976 and was taking the “A” Train from Times Square back to Brooklyn late at night.

The show went well but there were a few surprises yet to come.

The Hunt for Work, A Cold Adventure

2010-12-30T18:12:00.000-08:00

Although I had several jobs in the Fall of 1980, like most people working freelance I spent most of my time looking for the next job.
Like many others I would read through the "Trade Papers", Back Stage and Show Business, looking at the want ads.
Although both magazines deal mostly with acting jobs, there were a few tech and design jobs mixed in.
Today most Theatre tech jobs are listed in Artsearch published by the Theatre Communications Group.

http://www.tcg.org/artsearch/index.cfm

TCG also publishes plays and American Theatre magazine and also supports theatre productions all over America.

I sent out many resumes and dropped others off at theatres all over the New York City area.
There are theatres in all kinds of spaces, some good and some bad, and one long and narrow theatre that I interviewed was planning a double bill of staged versions of Frankenstein and Dracula.
They said that I could design the lights if I also built and painted the sets, ran the light board, sold tickets and gave them $50 a week.
I did not take the job.

At another theatre I was given a script to read; came back a few days later talked with the director but in the end I did not get the job.

Many old hotel ballrooms have found a second life being used by various theatre groups because rehearsal and performance spaces are very costly and hard to find in NYC.

I remember showing up for an open interview for jobs on a cruise ship and saw a line coming out the door and going down the street.
No one would ever mistake me as a Broadway dancer and as I got near the line I was told that those there for “techie” interviews could go right up so I squeezed my way up the stairs.
When I got to the top of the stairs I saw a large room full of hopeful dancers trying their hardest to make a good impression and get a job.
I remember thinking at the time that there were so many in the room that those in the back row could be naked or on fire and the director would never see them.
My interview was actually in a large storage closet and like many others I never heard back from them.

It does not seem to matter what work you have done in other places or where you have studied, when looking for work in NYC all they care about is what you have already done in the city no matter how small or bad it was.

I interviewed for a job at an out-of-town Theatre and was offered a three production contract to design the sets and lights for The Merrimack Valley Theatre Company in Manchester, New Hampshire.

The plays were to be A Christmas Carol, Oklahoma! and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
So right after Thanksgiving I packed up my special hammer and got ready to move North for three months.
After a long bus ride to New Hampshire I checked in at the theatre office and soon found out that things were not going to be as planned.

First of all the rooming house where they normally put up most of the cast and crew had just burned down and they had to scramble to finds rooms for everyone.
As I noted in a recent post my room was in an awful “Welfare Hotel” that was a long walk from the shop and theatre.

The scene shop had no staff, just my “Assistant” who had been cast in the show and a friend of the lead actor helped out once and a while.

To add to the fun it was a record cold December and it was 20 below zero several times.
I did not think that I was going to enjoy my time there.

One big positive was that The Palace Theatre was very nice, opened in 1915, it had a long and interesting history of productions and had been renovated a few years before I got there.
http://www.palacetheatre.org/about-us/

Old postcard of Palace Theatre

I have already written about the death of John Lennon but there were many other special moments that made my time in New Hampshire memorable and I will detail them in the next posts.

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August 1980, Transition

2010-12-17T13:16:00.000-08:00

My Thesis review went well and after a few re-writes I would have my MFA in Lighting Design.
It was time to pack up and head on to the “Real” world.
Even leaving Ann Arbor was an adventure.
I had to buy the largest portfolio case I could find; 32” x 42”.
I called the airline to make sure that it would fit if I carried it on, as I was not going to check my artwork.
They said it was 747 and that it would not be a problem.

I got to the airport and went through security (not the same X-rays and chemical tests of today, but they still hand checked most bags) my agent looked puzzled and called over his supervisor.
He said: “Hey this guy has sword in his bag!”
The supervisor looked in and laughed; “It’s just a T-Square, let him on the plane”.

Of course the portfolio case was too big to fit in the over head compartment and they were not sure what they were going to do with it when one of the stewardesses found room behind one of the seats.

So at 24 years old I was done with college and graduate school and moving home with no idea what I was going to do next.
I called some of my friends who were already working in New York City for some help on I what I should do next.
One friend was working over in New Jersey and my first job after college was going out there and helping him strike the set for “On Golden Pond”.
I spent a few days on my friend's couch and do not even remember if I got paid or not.

Another friend gave me the names and phone numbers for two scenic studios that he had worked for and I called the shops and told them who I was, that was just out of grad school and that my friend had worked for them.
Both places said that they had no idea who my friend was but I sounded good and to please come in for a job.

I did two jobs for The Theatre Machine, both on location and I never saw their shop.
This first job was in the Guggenheim Museum down in the theatre in the basement level.

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york

Like the museum, the theatre is round.
I helped to install a set, most platforms for the seating, and had a few interesting moments.
New York City has strict fire codes and all of the wood is fireproofed.
One day I got some sawdust in my eye and it burned for hours and I lost a half a day’s work.

Another we were moving in sheets on Masonite to cover the floor when about 20 to 25 sheets of it fell against me pinning me to the wall.
It was very hard to breathe or yell for help, but I was soon free.

The best thing that came of this job that one day at lunch I had the best piece of cheesecake that I have ever eaten.
Nothing has ever been close but I have no idea of the name or location of the restaurant.

The second job was downtown a bit near Union Square.
In an empty space that had been an Athletic Club, we built a mock-up of a boardroom for 3M.
They wanted to test the size and shape of a new big table they were going to have made to make sure they liked the shape and that it would serve their needs.
It must have been a very expensive table if they spent the extra money to have us build a mock-up of the room and table.

I worked next for Crawford Brother Studio in Brooklyn.
Their shop was in the neighborhood that is under both the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges and it was cool to see them way above the buildings.
It is a popular view and I have seen it many times in movies over the years.

I was hired to help build the set for a tour for a production of “Oh, Calcutta!”

http://www.broadwaymusicalhome.com/shows/ohcalcutta.htm

The show is famous for two things; Lots of naked people onstage and that it ran for a long time.

We built many acting cubes and small platforms that would make the set and loaded them in the bottom of a tour bus when we were done.
They did not too much room for the costumes.

So this was my start and working in the “Real” world, just a few months out of school and more adventures where just ahead.

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Six Characters in Search of an Author

2010-12-15T12:18:00.000-08:00

Every once and a while I go back and re-read my blog, fix mistakes and add new photos when I scan more or find some new ones online.
Well it seems that I left out an important play from my senior year at SUNY Buffalo.
I was asked to design the lighting for a production of Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello that was scheduled for December 1977.

Six Characters in Search of an Author , 1977

The play is an odd one and we did a good job making it even odder.
The play begins at an audition for a play when the “Characters” step out of the play and talk with the director.
The real director changed it from a play to a magic and circus act audition.

As the audience came to the theatre they were divided in half and brought into the Theatre in two groups.
As they would pass through the lobby they would see the “Characters” from behind some glass doors.
As they stepped into the Theatre the lights would come on with a Linda Ronstadt’s “Heat Wave” blasting through the speakers and the magic and circus acts performing onstage.
After everyone was in the music and action would stop and the second group would be brought in and the same things would happen to them and then the play would start.

As you can see from the show photos the set was unique with a hole in the floor center stage.

For the first entrance of the Father and Daughter “Characters” several flash pots were set off in the hole and the two would come up through the smoke.

I had worked with the director before; he is the one who cast our introduction to Theatre class as extras in his play the previous year.
I went to an early rehearsal to start thinking about the lighting when the director asked to read a few lines for someone who was not there and I said sure I would help out.
After the scene was over he said “Good, you now have the part.”
I said wait, but it was too late.
The part was for a stage hand, so I guess it was type casting and that is how I got into my second play at UB.

For some reason the play was delayed until after Christmas break and because the lights were set I felt that I did not need to be at every rehearsal.
I left one rehearsal early and turned off the stage lights and put on the work and house lights.
When I came back the next day the director said that he liked that look so the house lights into one section of the play and I had the crew gel all of the house lights with good old R51.

Speaking of gels I had to change all of the back lights because I had originally chosen a pale green that made it look like the actors were walking in mud.

As part of the publicity for the play the cast would roam about the campus and do parts of the play, hand out fliers and run off.
I was in the Student Union one time when they did this and was very funny to see the reaction to the other students as most had no idea on what had just happened.

The play was well received and I really enjoyed working on it, even when I had to yell my two or three lines out of the control booth window each night.

All We are Saying is Give Peace a Chance

2010-12-08T12:18:00.000-08:00

Thirty years ago today I was working in Manchester, New Hampshire on a production of A Christmas Carol.

This story jumps ahead six months in my blog timeline and I will come back to it in more detail, but I wanted to talk about what happened that day.
I was the Scenic Designer and Technical Director and was also suppose to be the Lighting Designer but the company had hired too many Stage Managers so they let one of them design the lights.

I worked alone most of the time because my assistant had been cast in the play and was rarely there.
They said: “Oh, he has a small part; he won’t have to be at many rehearsals and will be in the shop with you most of the time”.
That of course was just one of many lies they told me and his part kept getting bigger each day.

After working all day in a very cold scene shop, I walked back through the cold to my very cold room in what could best be called a flop house, welfare hotel or just a big dirty dump of a house to unwind and watch some TV.
The regular place that the theater company used had recently burned downed and they struggled to find place for everyone to stay.
Again more details about my wonderful time in New Hampshire will follow.

That night my assistant and I were watching Monday Night Football on TV in my room when the creepy guy from across the hall walks in and says that John Lennon had just been shot.

Shocked, we both turned to look at him and almost at the same time Howard Cosell announced Lennon’s death on the TV.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n73GFvAyIjs&feature=player_embedded

I worked alone in the shop the next day listening to nothing but Beatles and Lennon songs on the radio and thinking about what had happened.

As it turned out my assistant is the youngest person I know who ever saw the Beatles play live in concert.
When he was about five years old his mother took him to see them and all he remembers is that all of the girls, including his mother, screamed for the whole concert.

When I catch up to this time in my blog again you will see that this tragic moment was just a small part of a very crazy five weeks in my life.

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101st Technical Commando Brigade, Ann Arbor, MI

2010-12-05T12:01:00.000-08:00

Working in Theatre can be dirty, hard work, long hours and lots of fun.
Always looking for some stress release we are always joking among ourselves, having parties and poker games and each year while I was at Michigan someone made T-shirts for everyone.
Based on one of the teachers sayings, and a T-shirt he had, the T-shirt that was made my first year was red and said in big type “ Blow Me Dogface” with “Survivor of Winter 1979” below it.
One day we were all told to wear it to that teacher’s class who topped us all by having the original under his sweater.

The T-shirt from my second year was in the Michigan school colors of Maize and Blue.
I still have it, although it is a bit too small and fabric is a bit thread bare as it has been washed few too many times.
What did it say? See below:

We would wear them whenever we needed a boost after working long hours and I would forget that I had it on when I would next door to “Olga’s Death Gyros” for lunch.
I would get some odd looks from the “normal” or civilian people outside of the Theatre building.
“Olga’s” had the worst coffee in Ann Arbor, at least according to Dick Block one of our design teachers.

In August of 1980 I submitted my thesis with set, lighting and costumes designs for Marlowe’s “The Jew of Malta”.
Included with my 60 page paper were several light plots, working drawings, set renderings, costume plates and other related materials.

Set Rendering and Light Sketches

After the faculty reviewed the work I had to go in for an oral review and defend my work.
All of the other MFA students would always wait outside the room to see how you did.
The first question from everyone when I came out of the room was that they wanted to know what designs I had to redo.
I was very proud to tell them the faculty accepted all of my design work and all they wanted were a few changes and corrections in my paper.

Costume Plates

When I get all of my thesis scanned and posted online I will let my blog readers know.

College was now done for me and it was time to go back to Long Island and begin a new phase in my life.

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Richard III

2010-12-04T17:04:00.000-08:00

During my second year at Michigan we did Richard III with the late actor Nicolas Pennell as the lead.
He had worked regularly at the Stratford Festival in Canada and brought along a young fight choreographer who was in some of the battle scenes.
We used a stock platform for all of the Shakespeare plays and the designers just added pieces to the unit for each play.
For Richard III the scenic designer just took the set for Richard II from the year before and basically smashed it.
All the nice detail and trim pieces that had been added to the original set were broken off to help show the decay of the kingdom.

Richard II set before it was smashed for Richard III

During one of the fight scenes the fight choreographer was in a sword fight on the upper level, he was stabbed, spun and fell off the platform into the waiting arms off four soldiers who carried off his dead body.
Opening night all went well and the audience loved it.

On the second night the fight choreographer was in a sword fight on the upper level, he was stabbed, spun and fell off the platform into the waiting arms of two soldiers who dropped the fight choreographer who broke his arm and the two late soldiers helped the other two carry off the fight choreographer writhing in pain.

On the third night the fight choreographer was in a sword fight on the upper level, he was stabbed, and fell dead on the upper level and stayed there until the end of the scene.

It always seemed that I was working on one play or another, doing class work or working my thesis but somehow I managed time for a few dates while at Michigan, but no romance would come of it.
The second summer brought four more shows in rep and working to finish my thesis.
I would work only 100 hours on the set up of the lights and then work full time on my thesis, taking only short breaks for a weekly softball game and monthly poker game.

Two non-Michigan students who came to work on the summer rep were assigned to work with me on the electrical crew and they were both nice enough and I have a few odd memoirs of them.
One day while working in the lighting shop I had one of those moments when you feel like some mild electrical shock has gone through you body that causes you to shiver when it happens.
The girl working next to me, Martha, had the same experience and when we turned to ask the other guy if he had felt it too we found him on the floor having an epileptic seizure.

Another time I was working up in the catwalks of the Power Center with Martha when she begin talking about some major surgery that she had recently had done and I almost fell 30 feet from shock when she lifted up her shirt to show me the scar that ran from the middle of her chest to below her belly button.
I was not at all ready to be flashed while working up at that height.

Bio from Summer 1980 Program

I often found reasons not to work on my thesis.
One of my favorite excuses was just waiting until it got dark before I would come in to work.
Because Michigan is in the western part of the Eastern Time zone it stays light much later than it did back home on Long Island.
From time to time I found myself playing Frisbee with guys in the street until well after dusk at 10:30 PM.

A week or so before my thesis was done my parents and younger brother, who was 17 at the time, stopped by at the end of a cross country camping trip that had taken them to the Grand Canyon.
This was the longest trip that they had ever taken.
They collected most of my belongings to bring back home and left with me with just the bare essentials.

My thesis review was near and my time at Michigan was almost done.

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The Master Builder

2010-11-11T20:55:00.000-08:00

At one of our weekly graduate seminars the faculty noted that no one was assigned to design the set for one of the showcase productions and asked for a volunteer.
It seemed that everyone just melted down into their seats, looked into their armpits or out the window and avoided eye contact with the faculty.
Always looking for a new challenge I raised my hand and said that I would be willing to give it a try.

Scene Design for "The Master Builder" Act I - 1980

The play was the Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen, the father of modern drama.

I had read all of Ibsen’s major plays and wrote a term paper about his design ideas for my Contemporary Drama class the year before and I had just designed the set for the play for one of my scene design class projects so I felt confident that it would be an easy job.

Needless to say it was not.

Act II

At the first design meeting the director stated that he did not to have any walls in a play about an Architect who, of course, uses walls to design his buildings.

He also had an idea that today would be very easy to do, but thirty years ago I had to come up with a workable solution.

He wanted, what in effect today would just be the effect of a simply laser pointer being wiggled on the sky drop behind the set.

I had seen a rippling water effect that used broken mirror pieces in a pan of water, a fan blowing on the water and a light reflected off of the pan onto the stage.

I replaced the mirror and water with a piece of silver Mylar that was slit, a small fan and a red light aimed up on the sky drop.

I painted two projections with translucent dyes that were used in a pair of old Linnebach projectors.

One was a stormy sky and the other a sunburst both based on paintings by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch.

Act III

The set had several platform levels, two about 8’-0” x 8’-0” that played in different positions during each of the three acts.
Additional railing pieces were added to the set during the two act breaks.
Drafting tables and a desk were built specifically for the show and additional expanding foam railings were made from plaster molds.

I enjoyed working on the play and this was my last design project before the final push to finish my MFA Thesis and final summer at the University of Michigan.

Set Model

Dance tours to Interlochen Arts Academy

2010-11-06T21:25:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed working with the stagehand’s union and was excited that the Grateful Dead where coming to town and when the business agents asked who wanted to be on the crew I quickly volunteered.
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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Elton John Concert, Fall 1979

2010-10-29T17:29:00.000-07:00

I got a phone call from the business agent for the stagehands union and he asked me which of two concerts the same day that I wanted to work on: The Police or Elton John.
I choose to work the Elton John concert.
The concert was to be in Hill Auditorium, the large and wonderful music hall on campus where I got to Carlos Santana in concert the year before.
http://www.music.umich.edu/about/facilities/central_campus/hill/index.htm

The load-in call was 6:00 AM!

It was so early because there was a rehearsal for some university music group that could not be moved.

We needed to unload all items from the trucks that had to be flown over the stage, put them together and have them flown out before the Noon rehearsal.

I do not know why Elton John’s people would agree to the break in the middle of the load-in but it all worked out.

After lunch we came back and set up the rest of the sound and lighting equipment and also set up the musical instruments.
It is always fun to move a full size grand piano in a road case, even one that was painted orange.
Gee, maybe it was the organ that was orange and the piano was painted yellow, I forget.

As we continued to unload the truck I noticed that there was this young teenage girl standing at the top of the loading ramp.
Over the next hour or so she slowly inched down the load ramp toward the door.
When she was almost at the door one of the road crew turned to the girl and said “You can’t be here, you have to leave”.
You could see her heart break as she walked away defeated in her quest to see her idol.

I still have this pin I got at the Concert

I got a look at Elton when he came in a few hours later and stopped briefly to say hello to the crew.
He was wearing some odd jumpsuit looked like it was made from several strawberry Fruit Roll-Ups pasted together.

The road crew members were very cool, mostly very tall and thin and all from England.
There was one short guy who was the climber who was up and down the backs of the speaker stacks and up on the light grid focusing lights.
As the load-in was just about done I was asked to stay and help with the light focus as one of the all important ladder holders.
I was not really needed because once he was up the ladder he was climbing all over the truss focusing the lights, all without a safety harness.
Only when he was done did he step back on the ladder as he came down.
It was easy money and I also got to stay and eat with the crew.

The caterer was wonderful, there was a food table stocked with food all day long, but the dinner was even better.
It was November and he made a complete Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings.
For a crew, mostly from England, thought that this was very cool, enjoyed it all, especially the wine.

After dinner I went home during the show and listen to The Police concert which was simulcast on the radio.
When I came back for the load-out there was a small group of people waiting at the stage door waiting, hoping to see Elton, but all they got was me.
As I neared the door it opened and I was let in.
It was cool to think that I had the right look at 25 just to walk right past all the other people.
Okay, maybe it was how I was dressed, the tools I was carrying and the fact that I had just been there a few hours earlier.

The load-out went well and we got done just after midnight.
Just as the last truck was done and the door closed we noticed that the caterer had also just finished packing up.
He saw our disappointed look and opened his van and gave us a six-pack.
I do not know what brand of beer it was or even if it was cold, but it was best tasting beer I had ever had.
It was a looooong day starting with the 6:00 AM call, but it was fun day and I enjoyed it all.

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Concerts and Road Shows

2010-10-28T21:29:00.000-07:00

During my second year at Michigan I got to work on many outside projects, some of which even paid.
The local stage hands union (IASTE) was not large and when a touring Broadway show or rock concert was in town they would often need to hire extra crew.
They would use faculty and staff from the Theatre Department to fill out their crews.

The Ann Arbor local was run by a bunch of cool people who were ahead their time and other locals because they were one of the first to allow women carpenters and electricians into the union.
The first show I worked on with the union was a tour of the musical revue Eubie!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eubie!

The master electrician, Janice, was from Ann Arbor and had worked with the local union and I had just worked with her as one of the three lighting designers for the summer theatre repertory.
Everyone on the load-in crew was excited for her return and wanted to hear how the first part of the tour had gone.
Everything was going well but just before noon there was a loud snapping sound and one of the pipe-end ladders with six to eight lights came crashing down to the floor.
As soon as we knew that nobody was hurt the crew chief called "Lunch!" and most of us were sent away as they tried to figure what had happened.

It turns out the batten pipes over the stage had been welded incorrectly without inner pipe sleeves at the joints.
The batten just snapped at the joint under the weight of the hanging ladder.
During the next school break the college had all of the pipes hanging on the stage cut apart and re-welded properly.
The Theatre had been open for about 8 years and they were lucky that it had never happened before and that nobody was hurt.
It was a relief to everyone that it was not Janice’s fault.

I also worked the load-in and load-out for the tour of the play Deathtrap.
The most interesting part of that show was that the road boxes that held the various weapon displays, an important part of the play, that were lifted up and fitted directly into the walls of the set.
The lockable cover could be taken off as needed and easily put back on and locked up after the show.
There were many knives, swords, axes, guns and other fun props that they wanted to keep safe and away from curious hands and stop them from walking away.

I also got to work to load-in crew for some rock concerts.
I worked on the crew for Chicago and Elton John.
The Chicago concert was held in the large Chrysler Arena on campus and one of the first thing I noticed was that the food was much better on rock concerts.
For the stage plays there was only coffee and doughnuts backstage, but for the concerts they brought in a local caterer who put out a wonderful spread of food.

The work was hard but fun.
I had to laugh when I saw a 98 pound woman on the crew trying to move a large rolling speaker cabinet down the loading ramp from the truck and just watched her slide the whole way down.
Oh course I had my own fun when I was a “Human Bungee Cord” as I held on to road boxes as I rode the fork lift up to the stage platform, unloaded them and then rode back down for the next one.

As part of the load-in crew you do not get to the show but I when I returned for the load-out I did get to see and few songs at the end of the concert including 25 or 6 to 4.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvX_YqiM-hc&feature=related
It was fun to hear the song live because it was one of the songs that my friends and I tried to play in someone’s basement back in high school.
I knew just enough to play the basic bass riff as it just repeats over and over.
Tony and the Tone-deafs never got to play a gig and it was a onetime only experience for those lucky few people in the basement that day.

Coming up next: The Elton John Concert.

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Sound Design

2010-10-19T18:10:00.000-07:00

Idiot’s Delight opened in October of 1979 and it was my last major lighting design assignment while at Michigan but I still had plenty of other work to do before I graduated.

Oh course I still had to work on my MFA Thesis which had various deadlines all year long.
A rough draft of my Thesis support paper and preliminary set, light and costume design drawing were do several times before the final work could begin.
As it turned out that the one on the editors of the play collection book from which I got the copy of The Jew of Malta which teaching at Michigan.
The book was one that I had used in my Shakespeare class back at SUNY Buffalo.

I wanted it to look like I really researched the play, which I did, so I thought it would be good to talk with someone who really knew the script and I made an appointment to meet the English professor who edited the play collection and to talk to him about the play and see if he had any insights or thoughts about the play.
In a nut shell he could not care less, he offered some general comments about the period style and the play and at one point he said “I Think the other editor really worked with that play”.
I was able to include a few quotes from him but he was not really any help.

My first year I took costume design classes in addition to the lights ones and the second year I was in several scene designs classes and had plenty of class design projects to work on.
I moved from the scene shop into the electrics shop and I was now the department Master Electrician.
The job came with several duties that included general maintenance and repair of the stage lights and cables, supervising the lighting in the Arena Theatre and creating the sound effect and music tapes for all of the plays.

One of the first things I had to do was to quickly learn how to cut and splice recording tape.
The plays were not underscored with music as much as it is done today.
There might be preshow music, or change music, but it was mostly buzzers, chimes, dog barks and when possible many sounds were done live onstage.
I did some live recordings of actor’s voices, special music and sound effects I could not find on records.
I also had to figure out how to make long endless loop of tape so I could create 20 minutes of rain.
Typically the effect sounds on records last only a few seconds.
I ended up with a 12 foot loop of tape that ran across the electrics work room.

Sometimes I felt like I was doing an old-time radio as I had to make or record my own sounds for a play.
Today it is all done on the computer which makes much faster and a lot easier then back in 1979.
I remember that I had to go to the record shop and was surprised that they still had a listening booth so I could check out a few records to make sure that I got the right version of the music the director wanted.
It took me a while but I found just the right recording of the Lieutenant Kije Suite by Sergei Prokofiev, best known for his ballet score to Peter and the Wolf.

For plays in the Arena Theatre either I did a quick lighting design or most often I would supervise the student designer.
The designers were a mixture of undergraduate and graduate design majors and sometimes a directing student would give it a try.
Usually the small theatre was easy to take care of as there was another graduate student who took care of the scenic elements and I took care of the sound and lighting.

One time there was some excitement when someone who did not know what they were doing plugged the bare end of a speaker cable into a wall outlet thing it was a work light.
There was a big bang and the speaker caught fire.
Opps, you hope that they will not make that mistake again.

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Funny Incident and Hello World!

2010-10-06T08:09:00.000-07:00

After working in Theatre for forty years you would think that I have seen almost everything.
Well in last night’s rehearsal something funny happened.
We were getting ready for our second technical rehearsal for our production that opens this Friday.

Boy Gets Girl, 2010

http://www.brockport.edu/newsbureau/1511.html

The scene designer had bought a new piece of furniture for the set and several students had just assembled it and placed it on the set.
It was a low shelf unit designed for shoes in a closet.

We use students from various Theatre intro classes on the run crews and a girl who was setting up props walked out on the set, across the office platform and stepped on the shelf unit and snapped it in half but kept going up into the bedroom platform without stopping, but when she did she just turned around looked back and said “What!” as everyone was laughing.

Then the student said “I thought it was a step”.

While working on my blog and posting a recent entry I found a button I had not seen before.
It gave statistics on how many people have read my blog and which countries they are from.
I was very surprised and happy to see how many readers that I have from all over the world.
The top countries outside of the US for readers of my blog are: Germany, Russia, Brazil, Czech Republic, Israel, Vietnam, Australia, Finland and Poland, but there are many more.

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of my readers and I hope that you will leave comments or drop me an e-mail and let me know who and where you are.

As soon as the current play opens I hope to get back to writing my normal, if you can call them that, blog entries.

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Idiot's Delight

2010-09-30T19:07:00.000-07:00

At the end of my first summer and a short trip home to Long Island, I moved into my third and final apartment in Ann Arbor.
It was about three or four blocks north of the Theatre building and close to the Farmer’s Market.
My two housemates were both grad students but not theatre majors.
It was very small, but served its purpose well.

Like my first year, I designed the lighting for one of the first productions of the year.
The play was part of the Guest Artist series in the large Power Center Theatre in which I had just designed in that summer, but now I could design for my play alone.
The play was the Idiot’s Delight by Robert E. Sherwood which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1936.

Idiot's Delight, 1979

I felt lucky that we had a good production team.

The director, Jim, was a young faculty member who I had met on my trip first to Ann Arbor for my interview to get into the program.

While working as an actor a few years earlier Jim had guest roles in Room 222 and The Partridge Family, both of which were still being rerun at the time, and he would be teased whenever someone saw him on TV.

Program Cover

The scene designer was also a young faculty member who was in the "second year" of a one year visiting professor position.

Dick would go on to have some success as he is the Associate Head of the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University.

Nancy Jo, the costume designer, was a fellow MFA design student who now teaches at California State University, Long Beach.

I served as the lighting designer for the play and would go to; well, write this blog and a few other things here and there and maybe a thing or two over the years.

Idiot's Delight, 1979

Early on in the production process Jim invited the design team to go see an old movie playing on campus because he wanted us to see the style that was used in it.
We did not have VCRs back then so you could not just order any movie any time you wanted so it was just lucky that some group was showing it on campus.
We went to see My Man Godfrey from 1936 staring William Powell and Carole Lombard.

The movie is a lot of fun and still is one of my favorites.

The style and design of the play was defiantly affected by the movie.

The large set was Art Deco in style and I was asked if mirrored panels as part of the design would be a problem.
I said that I could work around them and that they should not be a problem, but I was not really sure.
In between the mirrored panels were frosted plastic panels that I lit with blue and white lights.
To add to my fun the costume designer had gold glamee costumes for the dancing girls.
Black, white, silver and gold: it was challenging but fun to do.

Late at night

In the play a war breaks out at the end and we needed an explosion outside of a big window that was rigged to fall apart.
We were lucky that one of the MFA students had just come off the road where he was the pyrotechnic for the band KISS.
Now I do not know for sure if it was Doug who blew Kiss’ drummer up so many times that it became the basis of the joke about killing numerous drummers in the movie This is Spinal Tap, but I do know that his flash pots were so big that they burned the curtains in the set window and had to be replaced each night.
Like everyone else from the show, Doug went on to have success in Theatre and was the production manager of last year’s Christmas Show at Radio City Music Hall.

As with all shows while I was Michigan lighting designers had to give a talk back after the shows open to discus and explain what you did with the lighting to our fellow students.
I felt lucky that people enjoyed my work but I was puzzled when someone said that they liked my lighting especially the little red tint that I had put into the set.
I did not know what they were talking about, and except for the explosion at the end, there was no red in my design.
I thanked them all for their comments and after they left I walked around the Theatre and found out that it was the Exit signs that were reflecting off of the set.

Puttin' on the Ritz

Renovation Update

2010-09-20T20:19:00.000-07:00

I have been writing about my life in Theatre and I am about to start commenting on what I did in my second year in Grad School.
I thought I would jump ahead briefly to comment on what is happening right now.
The new school year has begun and we are at the start of the fourth week of school.
Our first production is well under way and opens on October 8th.

http://www.brockport.edu/theatre/current.html

For the past two years we have been dealing with renovations to the Tower Fine Arts Center and its two Theatres and classrooms.
Most of it was supposed to be done by the start of this school year and surprise there is still a few issues.
As of today we still do not have working dimmers in the Mainstage Theatre.
New dimmers were ordered but the New York State budget delayed caused a delay in dimmers being ordered.
I think that they could have been ordered six months earlier but that did not happen.
We did get about 150 new stage lights to replace the old ones that had asbestos wires.
They will be a nice addition to our inventory; that is after we get some dimmers hooked up to run them.

I did use 4 of the new LED Strip lights for a music concert last Thursday.
They work without dimmers and I had them just doing a slow color blend from red to blue in an endless loop that one of my students programmed in the lighting board.

The Lab Theatre has gone through some major work this past summer and should be ready for use some time before the end of the year.

Roof off and new "I" beams in place

A new SkyDeck lighting grid is being installed.

http://www.iastage.com/skydeck_tension_wire_grid

SkyDeck panels being installed

The Lab Theatre will not look the same as before and the new work lights are very bright.

More photos of the SkyDeck being installed can be found here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=278389&id=560337941&l=2e43ee8003

Other photos of the renovations can be found at the following links:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=236891&id=560337941&l=60dbfb5b1c

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=253517&id=560337941&l=1dd9123715

There is a list of many things that are not yet done with the renovations, some big, some small and some just a pain in the butt.
The new air blowers are very noisy and the one in the lobby sounds like a jet engine.
I had them turn it off for the music concert but the other ones that were still on made it hard for me to hear the concert in the control booth.

We are also getting new pass card locks on the doors in place of keys, of course that is not ready and there are some doors that I cannot get in.

I thought I would take a break from my normal writings and share with my readers what is currently going on with my life in Theatre and I will get back to my regular postings soon.

Geoffrey E. Guja

2010-09-11T13:01:00.000-07:00

Nine years ago we lost too many good people and the world as we knew was changed forever.

It turns out that I had met one of those heroes thirty years ago while I was in college.

He was the twin brother of one of my friends and I enjoyed a few beers and many laughs with him during his visit to Buffalo.

Please take a minute to remember all of those who we lost that day.

Geoffrey E. Guja

Age: 47

Hometown: Lindenhurst, N.Y., USA

Occupation: Firefighter, New York Fire Department

Location: Ground, World Trade Center

.

Krazy Jim's Blimpy Burger

2010-08-27T09:35:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-24T18:06:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-16T13:02:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-06T10:08:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-02T10:59:00.000-07:00

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.

Scene Shop, Guest Actors and Christopher Walken

2010-07-14T10:49:00.000-07:00

I spent my first year at Michigan working in the scene shop.
At the start if each semester we would have a day when all the undergraduate stagecraft students would come in and get a crash course in the shop; the power and hand tools and how to use them and basic shop safety.
The Graduate Assistants were all assigned a group of tools with stations set up in the shop and the students would move around the shop getting a short lecture at each table.
I got to demo the Boring Tools, drill bits, and it was too exciting for words.
In my present job I get to explain all of the tools at the beginning of each semester in my now famous “This is a Hammer lecture”.
To date I have given it 56 times.

Working in the scene shop was pretty basic and nothing too wild happened while I was there.
I do remember that I was assigned the very important job of building all of the special platforms and flats for the set of the Inspector General.
It turned out that all of the special platforms and flats were small in size averaging about one foot square.
The set was a collection of odd shaped walls and levels and my crew and I had to fill in all of the gaps.
I had one very important contribution to the action of the play.
There was a pair of large doors that were the main entrance into the stage and a small sliding door cut into the door to act as a peep hole.
As a joke, after it was made, I added a rubber band to the back of the door to make it spring shut.
The director happened to come through the shop and thought it was so funny that he added it to the business of the play each night an actor would get his nose slapped by the springing back of the little door.

Each of the Guest Artist Series productions had a professional actor, director and/or a designer and my first semester at Michigan when we did Richard II Christopher Walken was the lead.

Richard II, Scene Design by Steven Gilliam

Although all of the other guest artists were good, Christopher Walken turned out to be the most famous.
Back in 1979 Walken was still mostly a stage actor, although he had done a few films by that time.
He seemed a bit distant to me, he had just finished filming the Deer Hunter, and when I later saw the film I could see why.

Richard II with Christopher Walken

Play List and Costume Crew Work

2010-06-29T10:05:00.000-07:00

In my two years at Michigan I worked on many plays, plus dance concerts and several touring plays and rock shows.
Here is a list of the major plays that I worked on while at the University of Michigan:

Showcase Productions - 1978/9

Blood Wedding
Red Roses for Me
People are Living There
In Celebration

1979/80

End of Summer
Tango
The Lion and the Jewel
The Master Builder

Guest Artist Series Production - 1978/79

She Stoops to Conquer
Richard II
The Inspector General
The River Niger

1979/80

Idiot’s Delight
Richard III
Eden
The Relapse

Summer Repertory Productions - 1979

Hay Fever
Ah, Wilderness!
Much Ado About Nothing
Wedding Band

1980

Blithe Spirit
La Ronde
Of Thee I Sing
A Midsummer Night’s Dream

As I had noted in an earlier post, I designed the lighting Blood Wedding, the first play of the year.
All of the technical and design classes at Michigan required some hands on crew work.
At the same time I was working in the scene shop, designing lights for Blood Wedding, working on classroom design projects I had to find time to work in the costume shop.

I was assigned to work on the costumes for the Guest Artist Series production of She Stoops to Conquer.
Mt first job was to learn how to use a seam ripper.
As in many theatre productions, costumes are often reused and altered to fit the design of the new play.
After many hours of deconstruction I was moved into the construction phase and learned to joys of running a serger or baby lock.

I was putting an edge on miles of light blue fabric to be used for petticoats for She Stoops to Conquer at the same time they were working on the costumes for Blood Wedding which were all black.
There was lots of cursing as we tried to share the machine.
It is not too hard to use, OK you could cut your finger off or ruin yards of fabric, but he biggest pain was trying to re-thread it if the thread broke and if you used the wrong color you would have to stop and rip it all out and start all over again.

By the end of my time in the costume shop I was doing OK and they even let my use the regular sewing machine and cut out some cloth for a pocket flap for a vest.
Just as I finished the flap on the vest, the costumer noticed that I had the grain of the corduroy fabric running the wrong way.
Of course everyone in the shop laughed and it was decided that it could stay as it was because it would be under a long overcoat most of the time.

I also had to work on the wardrobe crew for another play and was on the run crew for Red Roses for Me.
I did all the basic prep work making sure everything was ready before the play, but my most important job was working as a dresser backstage during the performance.
At one point in the play the main character goes offstage and is in a fight.
I had to tear apart the shoulder of his suit jacket and apply power to his elbows and knees to make it looked as he had been in a tussle.
After the scene I returned the jacket to the shop where a seamstress would repair it and prepare for the next performance.
That was extent to all of my advanced training in costuming while at Michigan.

Power Center for the Performing Arts

2010-06-18T08:48:00.000-07:00

I spent a lot of time in the Frieze building shops and theatres but there was a bigger theatre that we got to work in too.
At the time Power Center for the Performing Arts was less than ten years old and had state-of-the art stage equipment.
http://www.music.umich.edu/about/facilities/central_campus/power/index.htm

Power Center

In addition to the smaller student showcase productions in Trueblood Theatre there were four Guest Artists Plays in the larger Power Center for the Performing Arts each year.
With the addition of a professional actor, director or designer much more was expected from the Guest Artist Series plays.
The budget and scope of these plays were bigger and were given much more support than the showcase productions.
Soon after I graduated the Power Center went through a major renovation with the addition of a new scene shop and other added spaces.

The lighting board was an early computer controlled system that was not very sophisticated by today’s standards but still it was better than anything else I had seen in use at that time.
Reading over the new Technical Specifications I have seen that all of the lighting and sound equipment is new and up to date.

I would design the lighting for two summer repertory plays, one Guest Artist series plays and a music event.
I would also work on all of the other department productions in the Power Center as an electrician, carpenter or sound engineer.
Additional I worked on several touring Broadway plays, an opera and several dance pieces.
In total I worked on almost 30 major productions plus many smaller events in one capacity or another during my two years at Michigan.

The Power Center is a large theatre and was the biggest I had worked in up until that time.
Working up in the lighting rings was always fun especially those right over that front of the stage.
To focus the lights in the closest rings to the stage you had to sit with your butt on the edge of the opening with your feet on the other side, the light between your legs and the floor 30 feet below.
This was all done without a safety harness.

Lighting Rings over the Seats

To work on the lights in the Rings over the audience you had a climb a ladder on side of the balcony up through a trap door.
There were lights on the ladder too and these were very hard to focus.
The follow spots and sound control board was also there and the technicians running the shows often brought a larger coffee can with them as there was no quick or easy access to the restrooms during a performance.

Ladder up to the Rings

Using the large “A” frame ladder to focus onstage lights was also fun and if you use the sway of the top extension ladder just right you could reach lights six to eight feet apart.

The theatre had at least one union (IASTE) stage technician at all times plus a doorman.
The doorman, usually an older member of the union, checked people’s names as they came in to work.
The Senior House Tech technician kept a log book with every light and the date a new lamp was put into it and he was always mad at our teacher for using different lamps in the lights.
There were always 750 watt lamps in all of the lights and our teacher always had us add 1500 watt lamps in many of the front of house lights but always forget to change out a few after the show was over and this would always piss the Senior House Tech off.
When I designed in the theatre I would just plan to have two units side-by-side assigned to do the same job hoping that the combined output would throw enough light from the rear lighting ring to the stage.

There were a few other quirks with the theatre.
One student assigned to run the lighting board had to be replaced because he had an electrical charge to his body that would change the levels of the lights when he got near the control panel.
Just by running his hand over the board you could watch the levels go up and down on the dials and onstage.

Very unique.

They had not planned the loading dock very well as the road leading to it came up a hill and trucks had a hard time backing up it even if there was just a little ice on it.

One time while working in the theatre there was a wonderful bright shaft of light came down on the stage but the designer could not get it to turn off.
After a few minutes we all realized that a balcony door was open to the lobby and that the shaft of light was reflected sunlight bounced around the big glass lobby that way.
It only happened that one time while I was there, but it very funny watching the light board operator trying to figure out what was wrong.

There were other places that I got to work while in Michigan but I spent most of my time in the Frieze Building and the Power Center which were just a few blocks apart.

The Frieze Building

2010-06-16T11:12:00.000-07:00

The Frieze Building was my home for two years.
Although I got to work in other theatres and spaces, the Theatre Department and most of its classes were held there.
There were two theatres, classrooms, a library as well as a scene, costume and prop shops plus storage areas throughout the basement.

Here is a like to the official University of Michigan history of the building page:
http://umhistory.dc.umich.edu/mort/central/north%20of%20north%20u/Frieze%20Building/index.html

It was old, the equipment was not up to date, but it still was a great place to work and learn about Theatre.
Built in 1905 it had seen several changes since it was the Ann Arbor High School.
The scene shop was in the old gymnasium and the main theatre space had been renovated many times.
One feature that was unique was the freight elevator that went from the basement up to the shop and up to the theatre above.
To get to the theatre the elevator had to lift a section of the floor up with it as it came through the stage floor in the upstage right corner.

The main theatre was named Trueblood and the proscenium and stage floor had been extended and slots were cut into the ceiling for lights.
The onstage fly grid had wooden slats and very scary for anyone, especially heavy people, to walk on.
The lighting and sound equipment had long seen better days, but it was still a great place to work and the fact that there was a ghost even made it better.

It only took a few late nights working in the space for the stories of the “Trueblood Ghost” to come out.
There was always some odd bump or other noise, maybe it was the wind or it could have been the pigeons that lived in the eaves, but there always seemed something odd that would happen during a show.
For me I would often find things that were in places that no one working would have put them or objects that moved on their own, like a small ball just rolling across the floor.

One night, while working late in the theatre, I could not get the house lights to turn off.
I tried the wall control switch several times with no results so I thought that I would just shut off the main power feed to the system.
The main switch was an old style big knife blade handle, something from a Frankenstein movie, a bit unsafe and scary.

I pulled the handle, cut the power to the lighting system and all the lights stayed on.
Mmmmm? Think I’ll go home.
When I came back the next day the lights were off and I could not find anything wrong with the system and it all worked perfectly fine after that day.

There was a second smaller theatre that was just off the shop in which many small projects were held.
The Arena Theatre held maybe 50 or so people and did not have great equipment for sound or lights.
When I was the department electrician my second year I helped on may shows there either designing or supervising the other students working in there.
Maybe times it was the first space that a lighting design student would work and many times they were other design students, actors or directors who were just doing it for class.
I had to show them how equipment worked and clean up after they were done plus fix their many mistakes and this really helped prepare me for my current job.

The basement storage was a maze of odd rooms and spaces with sets pieces, props and furniture all over the place.
One time while looking for something in one of the dirt floor spaces of the basement I saw a light flash back at me and thought that my flashlight hit a mirror or other piece of glass but as it move in a odd pattern I thought maybe I had meet the “Trueblood Ghost”.
The girl with me was a bit concerned but soon two college facilities workers came our way, nodded and just walked on by.
I do not think that we ever found what we were looking for.

The attic was just as much fun with its beams air ducks and graffiti from the early 1900’s.
It was almost a complete forth floor, but one had to be careful where you walked.
There were stories of people who lived up there and you could clearly see that people had at least stopped to eat lunch there or some little party.

I worked on many plays, dance concerts and other events in the two theatres in the Frieze building but there were many other places that we worked including the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre in the Michigan League Building, Hill Auditorium, Chrysler Arena and the glass wrapped Power Center for the Performing Arts.
Many of the other spaces were far better than the theatres in the Frieze Building, but it always seemed comfortable and safe to work there.
It is gone now, they have turn it down, but they save a little of the façade to use as part the new building that will soon take its place.

Ann Arbor

2010-06-15T21:09:00.000-07:00

There was a former classmate from UB who was finishing up his MFA degree at Michigan just as I got there.
Having someone else from my old school made it easier, and at times harder, for me when I got to Ann Arbor.
It was nice to have a place to stay when I came out to interview and looked for my house in the fall plus it was also nice that he showed me around town and took me to some parties.
Because I was another student from UB there was some of “who does he think he is” and “what does he know” but the worst thing is that I had a New Yawk accent.
As I soon found out there was always some hazing of the new students, mostly all in jest, and I was not the only new student and we all had to prove ourselves to the older students and faculty.

Ann Arbor was, and still is, a cool place to live and I enjoyed exploring it when I had the time.
There was a lot to see and explore in Ann Arbor.
As I have worked on my Blog I have reviewed my old Playbills and have looked up old friends and places on the internet.

I recently took a virtual tour of Ann Arbor with the help of Google Maps Street View feature.
After thirty years I was surprised how many things still look the same, but of course there have been changes.
The three houses that I lived in are all there and look about the same, although one house had scaffold along side of it and looked like it was getting some long needed updating.

The college and town as grown since my time there and most recently they tore down the old Theatre building just as they opened a wonderful new multi-Theatre complex on the north campus.
For those of us who spent many hours working in the Frieze building we will miss it.
I found a nice photo set on Flickr that shows the Frieze Building in it's last days:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mfobrien/sets/72157594246447684/

A postcard shows the building when it was still the Ann Arbor High School:

As a student I did not have a car, so I explored my world mostly on foot and with the help of an occasional bus or friend’s car.
During my time there I went to all of the college museums; the Arts, Natural History and small but interesting Museum of Archaeology, where you could see ancient treasures stolen from other countries.

http://www.umma.umich.edu/

http://www.lsa.umich.edu/exhibitmuseum/

http://www.lsa.umich.edu/kelsey

They have expanded and changed all of the museums since 1980, but I did enjoy exploring them at the time between classes and working on productions.
I also found the rare book room in the library, although I was often amazed by how old some of the books were in the regular collection.
The rare book room is now part of the “Special Collections Library”, although I was disappointed they only have a Second, and not First, Folio of Shakespeare’s plays.

http://www.lib.umich.edu/special-collections-library

There were many fun shops, restaurants, bars and others places I like to go.
For anyone who has spent time in Ann Arbor you would know Nickel’s Arcade, the Cube, the Fleetwood Dinner, Old Town and the Blind Pig.

There were plenty of things that I never got to do in Ann Arbor; places I never saw, but I always had a great time when I was there.

My days were full of working on a plays, researching papers or drawing and drafting, but those short times between classes, walking home or those rare days off I enjoyed the town as much as I could.

I got to go back to Ann Arbor five years after I graduated, but its been almost 25 years since I was last there and a return trip is long overdue.

Classes and Football

2010-06-07T20:32:00.000-07:00

As a Lighting Design major at the University of Michigan I took a variety of Theatre Design classes but I also had to take a few non-Theatre courses.
I took two classes from the English Department, Modern and Contemporary Drama and one from the Psychology Department, Perception.

Modern and Contemporary Drama: neither class dealt with present-day plays as the first plays we read were written in the 1880’s; the newest was from the 1950’s.
But they were both good classes and I got to read many classic plays, at least 35 each semester, and I think I read everything from Ibsen, Chekov, Shaw, Strindberg, Beckett plus many others.
The teacher, the same for both courses, was a scholar of the works of Samuel Beckett.
The teacher was so proud when he got a return letter from Beckett after sending him a copy his latest book.
The teacher went on and on about how great the letter was and how Beckett was so “avant-garde” and that he was such a new post-modern minimalist, blah, blah, blah.

The letter was a blank piece of paper.

I am thinking “Hey, this guy just Shit on you, and doesn’t care what you think about his plays”, but I did not say a thing.
He was a good teacher, I learned a lot from him and he is still teaching at Michigan and writing books on Beckett, Arthur Miller and others.

Unlike most MFA programs which are three years, at the time Michigan’s was only two years, but we also had to take classes over the summer which made up the normal number of credit hours.
As part of my fellowship I had to work for the Department and my first year I was assigned to the scene shop where I would work with students from the basic stagecraft classes who had to do shop hours each week.
My second year I served as the department electrician and sound designer.

In the summers we worked on four summer repertory plays and took a few special topic courses from guest lecturers.
As a graduate assistant we all worked on many shows, designing for some and just helping out on many others.
Some of the classes required that we would work on specific crews such as sewing in the costume shop or working the wardrobe run crew for the costume design class.
Of course I enjoyed it when I got to design the lighting for shows but I really enjoyed all of the different crews I got to work on.

Because there were at least eight to ten major productions a year, numerous one act lab shows plus four more in the summer, there was always something that needed to be done on one show or another.
It is hard to remember every show I have worked on because my involvement might be limited to just helping out for a few hours one day in order to get a show finished or to fix a problem that may have come up.
Just so we would not get bored we also worked with the Dance and Music Departments and a number of events and I got to work with the local stagehands union when several turning plays and rock shows came through town.
Stories to follow soon.

Of course with all of this work to be done I quickly learned that no work was scheduled on Saturdays in the fall as everyone took off to watch the most important event in the world:

MICHIGAN FOOTBALL!

It is hard to tell from the efforts of the last few seasons, but back then it was all about BO and Football.
I was so busy trying to get into school that I did not even think about getting tickets for the game and although as a student I could have bought season tickets, that first year I would have gotten the worst seats in the end zone.

It takes many years of buying tickets before you slowly move around to the side of the stadium and many more before you are near the 50 yard line.
I knew some students who would buy the season tickets just to sell off the Ohio State game ticket to pay for the rest and even more if they were lucky.
I was so busy with classes and designing lights for the first play of the year that I did not even pay too much about football and thought that there would be plenty of time to catch a game next year.
Things change and I only got busier as time went on, and as you can guess I never got to a game, but it did not seem important to me at the time.

I did get close to a game one week, but that is another story (there may be a waterbed in the story...).