Sky King

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.

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