Friday, November 21, 2014

Roadies

I am fascinated by roadies.

At CY Stephens, often they schedule calls to load in and set up a travelling show before performance. If you are signed up for the whole thing (load in, performance, load out) it can be a very long day. Especially for the big shows. I haven't gotten on a performance call yet. But anyway, a load in call needs things like electricians, lights, and your basic stagehand (me). The stagehands are basically at the beck and call of the roadies.

Most shows run with one or more roadies. These are people in the employ of the show and they know how everything goes together, where everything should go, what they need for power, for lights, for rigging. They tell us what to do and we do it. This sort of thing has a decent amount of specialized language, most of which I don't know. The most basic thing they ask is that you know your stage directions: stage left (left facing audience), stage right (right facing audience), downstage (toward the audience), upstage (away/back from the audience). When you unload stuff, they will tell you where to drop it. Often with stage directions.

Some roadies make the stagehands do all the work, some don't want any help, some are really nice and teach you and learn all your names, some have short tempers and are rude.

Roadies travel with the show. They spend long days setting something only to rip it down that night, load it back up, sleep on the bus on their way to the next show, rinse and repeat. That's crazy, I don't know if I could do that. I have moral issues with both setting and striking. I don't mind one or the other, but if I built it, I don't want to be the one to destroy it. A day off is a day of travelling. And the people that choose that life, that are away for weeks and months at a time, are going to be unique people.

The first one I worked with was a wiry guy with tattoos, glasses, a tam in Jamaican colors (possibly hiding dreads), black tank top, black Dickies shorts, reddish blond sideburns dangerously close to mutton chops. He went by the name Scarecrow.

Unfortunately they aren't all quite that interesting.

I asked and I guess there are sometimes girl roadies, generally lights or electricity.

Maybe I'll get really good at stagehanding and then I can join Jacob's band as show crew when he gets famous and see what it's like.

Small Spaces

I mentioned I have a fear of heights. That's pretty normal. Another thing people are often afraid of is small spaces. And I have the opposite of that. I love small spaces.

Forgive me, I'm writing on my phone and I can't type as fast and I have auto correct. So on one hand my sentence construction is stunted and on the other hand I may have totally weird autocorrect.

But what would the love of small spaces be? Claustrophilia? I suppose that depends on whether claustro actually means small spaces or means being confined. Not really into being confined.

I think it comes from growing up in small spaces. I rode on a lot of airplanes, with their cramped seating and tiny bathrooms. I liked the efficiency of a place for everything in those tiny bathrooms, a nook for the toilet paper, a slot for soap. We lived in small apartments at one point, six of us in a three bedroom. I actually dislike large open rooms to some extent. I'd rather read in our small study than in the open living room.

I went spelunking once. I can bravely charge into all sorts of small holes as long as I know I can get back out again. I do remember once when I was a kid and some friends were digging a tunnel in snow. Not my thing. You go in head first and you are face into a blind tunnel, bundled up in thick clothing, unable to turn around, only hope you can wiggle your way backward without space. I don't like that small space.

Basically, I was just pondering this odd trait recently. At CY Stephens, we were setting for a show and a section of portable stage from the show had been set down, and then the roadie discovered we should have shoved some plugs that were running under the stage through a hole in the stage. The roadie was standing there, stymied, and I volunteer, "I can get it." I'm not good at measurements, I don't know how big the space was, but I can tell you that out of a crew of mostly heavy a lifting men, I was one of the skinniest and smallest, and one of maybe two that could fit. The other being the skinny roadie, but he didn't seem eager. I was.

I don't know why, but that is fun.

I remember setting for a big event at Hilton once and me and another girl spent a full day running cables under a stage. My knees ached, but I loved it. I feel special being able to disappear and appear elsewhere.

So maybe I can't be an uprigger. I just need to find where we keep our crawl spaces and volunteer. As long as they aren't filthy I guess. Don't want that stuff in my hair.

Saturday, November 8, 2014

Sci Fi

I wish I could think like this.

"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam." - Frederik Pohl

Sci-fi, technology, get's me excited. I wish I could somehow bind and publish the way I feel about it.