Opening Night!
PS: Still working on editor..... But will continue posts:
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Opening Night
The play was "Guys and Dolls," a play based in the '50's during the raging baby-boom in the USA. Centered around a group of gamblers and a religous faction of ultra-conservatives who wish their gabling boy-friends/husbands to stop drinking, smoking and gambling and to embrace god. Best play we've done thus far.
The play was going to start in less than ten minutes, and Teale Bennet is still in the booth getting emotional support from her Techie friends. Not that she had an important part, no far from it, just the stress of the last few days was waring her mind thin.
Nick Kendall was in the left spot deck, supported by Jason Gejeaski (go damn Polish names....) in the right deck (spot-light decks that is
). A few minutes later they toasted with cheap plastic cups and cheap, Sam's Choice cola, what we get for letting a cheap-skate buy our pop. Andy was at the head board, with Michael "Mike Kill-Joy" Peterson working sound.
Two minutes remaining, Teale is saying her last good-byes before tearing out of the booth after hearing Herr Albrecht coming up the steel stairs.
"Andy, bring the lights back up, we have a problem!" he shouted, coming up four stairs at a time. "Stage crew is still not ready, they need some help!"
"Damn it! I knew we should have assumed control over those bitches!" Andy shouted.
"Hey, no way to talk in school!"
"He's got a point, let five, blond-haired, cheerleaders call themselves "Stage Crew" and we have a problem." Nick said, coming out of the deck rolling his eyes. "What's worng?"
"Light-Bar-5 is jammed at the reversal point."
"Phük (won't say that word here
)!"
"ANDY!"
"Sorry, we'll have to go up and fix it from the grid. When is it first needed?"
"Scene three!"
"Crap!"
"Andy!"
"Sorry.... darn..... we have fifteen minutes to get up there. Gejeaski, Kendall, get up there and fix it, fifteen minutes! Mr. Albrecht, can you take over spot right?"
"Sure."
"Yates, you take left! Break!"
Five minutes later Gejeaski and Kendall we standing on steel cross bars suspended 75 feet in the air. Twice as high as the catwalks, and lacking a solid floor, the "grid" as it was called, had claimed two lives in the past, one of which a 20-40 light, the other a $1,000 "dumb" smart-light. Working next to high-tention wires and 600lbs weights suspended by those wires, Gejeaski and Kendall worked to get the Lighting-bar-5 (known in the group as "LiB-Fiver") in the pitch dark as the play went on underneith them. It took them six minutes, but all was better.
Up in the booth, the play was going as it normally does. Everything was easy, no forgoten cues, no missing actors.... like last time.
Kendall and Gejeaski came back, greasy and racked but okay. Resuming their positions as "fliers" or "spotters," the play went on as usual until act 2, scene 1 when on of the main characters forgot her lines, and needed to be consulted by the stage manager during the early intermission. After she had stopped cry and had recovered enough to act again, the play continued.
After the play had ended, the techies (minus "Mike Kill-Joy" aptly named that by Kendall, for his "social" behavior (or his lack-there-of)) went to the cast/crew party at America's favorite breakfast place, Dennies. Taking up the whole building, much to the "delight" of truckers and regulars, the part ensued until 1:30am when the last, Kendall, Shapasian and Bennet finally got a lift home in Mr. Kendall's car.
