Barber's and The Rox

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

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 ! ! ! !

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

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

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

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

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.



.