Classes and Football

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...).