Summer 1979

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.