Chapter 18 - "It was the night before Chirstmas and all through the house..."
The Nightmare Before Christmas Show
The Red Paintings
Friday December 23rd
The Judith Wright Centre
Brisbane
....and so it came to pass that it fell to myself, Karen, and Kate to design and construct the entire set for The Nightmare Before Christmas Show being held two days before Christmas in the Judith Wright Centre. Of course, we didn't really know any of this...due to the venue being booked only three weeks before the show, and the date being confirmed even closer to the ultimate deadline. We were given our budget, which we frequently went over, and so were on our way to buy materials and get started.
During the debacle of the The Red Paintings sacking their inept manager and sorting out the show, I had been plugging away making gravestones, something I figured even with my "skills" at creativity I could avoid going the way of the pear. It turned out I wasn't too bad at it, and soon enough I had my Gothic-esque gravestones knocked out in no time. Tip: if you ever need to make a gravestone, mix lots of sand in with the paint, about equal measures of both, and it turns out pretty good.
As I worked on them, drawing the desired gravestone shape, cutting it out, then drowning each and every join with masking tape and liquid nails, I often wondered as to exactly what Sue next door must be making of all this as she stared at me through the kitchen window ("yes I can see you woman!"), with her mouth slightly agape to one side. Especially when at one stage, at 3am all I had to use for cutting purposes was a very large kitchen knife and as I went downstairs under the house to cut some cardboard I shot her my best manic smile and disappeared into the darkness. Now, that may have seemed strange, but I wondered as to exactly what Sue was doing up at 3am. The past couple of weeks I have noticed a bubbling noise coming from under the house, and there is a very small room with a light that is always on inside. Do they own fish they keep from the public gaze? Are they drug barons with their own marijuana factory under the kiddies' bedrooms? Do they keep dominion over a small group of Vietnamese boys who are ordered to cook stew twenty four hours a day? As the sleep deprivation began to make me imagine these ridiculous things, I kept working.
Much of the next few weeks was spent buying materials, and experiencing all new kinds of never-before-seen ineptitude. For example, there is a hardware outlet and garden centre chain here called Bunnings. It is a place where the typical clientele appear to be unwholesomely obese hoarders of fat try and cross their arms as they look at fence undercoat while their sagging pendulums of glutinous mass peep out from under their paint-stained tee shirts. It is a place where the whose work force is made up of either:
A] Girls whose father obviously got them the job because they are worthless examples of human existence and the hope is that after working here they will know the value of responsibility and earning your money rather than stealing it. Failing that, they'll at least maybe learn what counter syncing is.
B] Aimless old men who alarmingly managed to stumble into a job while on their way to the bowling green one day. Who subsequently believe that just because Time has been a close companion of theirs for more years than it takes to wrinkle an elephant, they somehow know everything no matter what the subject.
Needless to say neither of these two demographics were in anyway useful and in fact hindrenced our aims at several stages. Nevertheless we by and large had all of the materials we needed, and although we were constantly going back and forth to warehouses and supply stores, as the date of the show drew closer, the work rate increased at an increasingly frantic exponential rate.
One constant remained however; the need to make lists. There was a list for work yet to be done, work currently being done, work that had been done, work that might get done if there was time, work that might not get done but probably will, work that probably won't get done but hopefully will, and work that was only going to get done if the work that was currently being done and the work that was yet to get done, got done. Little was done without a consultation with the list...
"Hey, d'you know if I ne-"
"Consult the list!"
"Anyone know if we have a-"
"Consult the list!"
"Where's m-"
"CONSULT THE LIST!!"
Indeed there was quite a lot of shouting over the whole period. The distance with which the toys were thrown out of the pram grew longer the closer we got to the deadline. Shouting matches would occasionally but not frequently go on into the night, but even though I was often at the brunt of one of these furores, I never forgot exactly what the subject matter that was being shouted about would be, and I always had to (inwardly) chuckle. To laugh out loud would have been lunacy, and met with a swift belt to the cranium. Often there would be uproar if the suggestion that a candy cane tree (as seen in Tim Burton's take on Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) should be made with curly bits of chicken wire or red and white vinyl twirling beautifully off and sprouting little candy cane on the ground. Or the possibility that a snake eating a Christmas tree should have black material sown onto it rather than paint with black fibre paint was met with a cutting look and a subsequent argument discussing the intricacies and outricacies of Paint vs. Material. All the while I would be thinking, of all the things I imagined myself arguing a case for, painting a snake that has swallowed a Christmas present and is in the process of eating a Christmas tree certainly wasn't one of them.
We got on with it however and continued our work. Kate's main task was making the ten foot high knobbly trees that would frame the stage from either side, mine, after the gravestones, was making the coffin sleigh and helping Karen with the 35 square metre backdrop that we were creating. Karen was also making the skeletal reindeer to go in front of the sleigh (although at this point I would like to make it clear that a number of the reindeer's femurs were created by myself. Day in day out would this constantly be on our minds, any free time we had was a break from cutting out pieces of foam or papier macheing onto chicken wire. As wonderfully fulfilling as my telemarketing job was, I jumped at the chance to give it up and dedicate all of my time to making the set for the show. The only downside from this, aside from not having a wage any more, will be that I will no longer enjoy the conversations between some of my coworkers. To briefly put on show just a small fraction of their ever impressive displays of stupidity and digress for a moment, I give you a few short examples.
[1] You know that game where you write down famous people's names on a bit of paper and stick them to each other's foreheads so they have to guess who they are by asking questions where only yes or no is the answer? You do? Excellent, well one day a few of the gang in PHM decided to play, and one poor sap was the Hunchback of Notre Dam. 'Interesting', I thought, 'showing a little bit of literary culture and not plucking for the usual Britney Wossname or some other forgettable celebrity. Until they started talking.....
"Um...am I American?"
"...."
"Yes."
[2 ] "Did you know when Christopher Columbus first landed in Australia he killed like, loads of Aboriginals?"
[3] "...well, my long-term plan is to be like, a rapper and stuff, and be like fool hardy* like 50 Cent and stuff. He's like the dawg man and you know I got some rhymes if you wanna listen..." (don't worry I shall spare you).
*by 'full hardy' the chap is not referring to the adjective meaning, to be marked by unthinking boldness or to possess defiant disregard for danger or consequences. In this case the term 'full hardy' refers to being 'down with it' as they say, 'on the street', otherwise known as 'cool'.
So yeah, I'm going to miss that place, I'm especially going to miss what's his face, and that other one, you know, that guy. I shall be aiming to get a new job in the New Year and I shall die horribly in a police shoot out whilst wearing nothing but a thong before I go back to telemarketing.
Time marched on however and the list of things that had been done was very slowly dwindling. When I mean we relied on lists, I mean we relied on lists. To make a coffin sleigh for example, one could not simply write "make coffin sleigh" into the Book of the Many Lists. There would be coffin sleigh related heading, with sub categories as to many different aspects that made up the coffin sleigh. The a new list to accommodate what had to be bought to make each of these sections to the whole. Now, some of you will inevitably be asking yourselves, or questioning your computer screen with the words "What on Earth is a coffin sleigh". Well, aside from obviously being a sleigh made out of a coffin, you'll have to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas to get a decent mental image of what were trying to create, and understand its relevance to the show. I won't go into explaining what we were making, you'll have to just take my word for it that skeletal reindeer, flying ghost dogs and parachuting army candy were all necessary.
The workload was immense, and we were exceptionally busy for a lot of the time. Kate was happy multi-tasking as only the girls can do, watching Mel Brooks comedies while working on the trees, but even the comic genius of watching dancing Nazis just didn't cut it for me. I usually worked under the house, and mostly at night, as during the day we were buying the materials and it was too hot to do anything too exerting. The coffin sleigh probably took the longest to do, as it had so many parts to it. Firstly we made a wodden frame around a coffin base that was found in a scrap shop and then I covered it in black plastic cardboard, making the side panels and a curved lid which I was quite rpoud of, even if it was a little off center. Then it was spray painted, with struts coming out the back of it to support a large barrel that was attached behind and filled with (empty) boxes of presents. Then I made Jack Skellington and stuck him at the head of coffin, ready to ride the coffin sleigh to victory and into the hearts and minds of the fans. The reindeer were later attached at the venue, with lots of fiddly wires. Then it was all strung together with rope and wire and raised from the floor to be elevated beside the stage, that was done with a lot me yelling to the Power That Was in the rafters, "woah...little bit...okay...raise his head bit...stop...no back a bit...okay...now his ass...just a little...easy....okay."
When it was all raised, I have to say we three stepped back and were pretty impressed with ourselves. It looked like the coffin sleigh, it really did look well. But that was nothing. We had rolled out the backdrop on the floor to dust off dirt and touch it up a little, and all those present were suitaby impressed. It's the first time I've actually heard a collective gasp of amazement by a group of people. Karen and I laid out our 35 square metre work of art that we had painted in a small room no bigger than five square metres and looked at each other with big cheesy grins of beaming smugness. Even seeing it on the floor wasn't the best thing however, when it was raised behind the stage, to take its position as the backdrop for the night, even I was tacken aback by how good it looked. It really did look professional. We had captured the essence of the archetypal Nightmare Before Christmas scene.
The hour was getting closer and for the first time, staring at the set that only three people had created in just over a month, my confidence that we were going to pull it off was growing. Every time a trickle of doubt entered my mind that something would go wrong, I looked at the stage and my confidence grew that little bit more. The sleigh was in place, hanging from the ceiling, the pumpkins I had carved that morning had finally ben painted by some kind soul, the gravestones were all tentatively placed around the equipment on stage, the trees had their final touches of cobwebs strewn over them, the backdrop was continuing to look great. Everything was ready, now it was up to the band and the people at the Judith Wright Centre to do our set justice.
And then with about 15 minutes to go we were told the sound engineer hadn't arrived.....
[to be concluded, as they say....]
The Red Paintings
Friday December 23rd
The Judith Wright Centre
Brisbane
....and so it came to pass that it fell to myself, Karen, and Kate to design and construct the entire set for The Nightmare Before Christmas Show being held two days before Christmas in the Judith Wright Centre. Of course, we didn't really know any of this...due to the venue being booked only three weeks before the show, and the date being confirmed even closer to the ultimate deadline. We were given our budget, which we frequently went over, and so were on our way to buy materials and get started.
During the debacle of the The Red Paintings sacking their inept manager and sorting out the show, I had been plugging away making gravestones, something I figured even with my "skills" at creativity I could avoid going the way of the pear. It turned out I wasn't too bad at it, and soon enough I had my Gothic-esque gravestones knocked out in no time. Tip: if you ever need to make a gravestone, mix lots of sand in with the paint, about equal measures of both, and it turns out pretty good.
As I worked on them, drawing the desired gravestone shape, cutting it out, then drowning each and every join with masking tape and liquid nails, I often wondered as to exactly what Sue next door must be making of all this as she stared at me through the kitchen window ("yes I can see you woman!"), with her mouth slightly agape to one side. Especially when at one stage, at 3am all I had to use for cutting purposes was a very large kitchen knife and as I went downstairs under the house to cut some cardboard I shot her my best manic smile and disappeared into the darkness. Now, that may have seemed strange, but I wondered as to exactly what Sue was doing up at 3am. The past couple of weeks I have noticed a bubbling noise coming from under the house, and there is a very small room with a light that is always on inside. Do they own fish they keep from the public gaze? Are they drug barons with their own marijuana factory under the kiddies' bedrooms? Do they keep dominion over a small group of Vietnamese boys who are ordered to cook stew twenty four hours a day? As the sleep deprivation began to make me imagine these ridiculous things, I kept working.
Much of the next few weeks was spent buying materials, and experiencing all new kinds of never-before-seen ineptitude. For example, there is a hardware outlet and garden centre chain here called Bunnings. It is a place where the typical clientele appear to be unwholesomely obese hoarders of fat try and cross their arms as they look at fence undercoat while their sagging pendulums of glutinous mass peep out from under their paint-stained tee shirts. It is a place where the whose work force is made up of either:
A] Girls whose father obviously got them the job because they are worthless examples of human existence and the hope is that after working here they will know the value of responsibility and earning your money rather than stealing it. Failing that, they'll at least maybe learn what counter syncing is.
B] Aimless old men who alarmingly managed to stumble into a job while on their way to the bowling green one day. Who subsequently believe that just because Time has been a close companion of theirs for more years than it takes to wrinkle an elephant, they somehow know everything no matter what the subject.
Needless to say neither of these two demographics were in anyway useful and in fact hindrenced our aims at several stages. Nevertheless we by and large had all of the materials we needed, and although we were constantly going back and forth to warehouses and supply stores, as the date of the show drew closer, the work rate increased at an increasingly frantic exponential rate.
One constant remained however; the need to make lists. There was a list for work yet to be done, work currently being done, work that had been done, work that might get done if there was time, work that might not get done but probably will, work that probably won't get done but hopefully will, and work that was only going to get done if the work that was currently being done and the work that was yet to get done, got done. Little was done without a consultation with the list...
"Hey, d'you know if I ne-"
"Consult the list!"
"Anyone know if we have a-"
"Consult the list!"
"Where's m-"
"CONSULT THE LIST!!"
Indeed there was quite a lot of shouting over the whole period. The distance with which the toys were thrown out of the pram grew longer the closer we got to the deadline. Shouting matches would occasionally but not frequently go on into the night, but even though I was often at the brunt of one of these furores, I never forgot exactly what the subject matter that was being shouted about would be, and I always had to (inwardly) chuckle. To laugh out loud would have been lunacy, and met with a swift belt to the cranium. Often there would be uproar if the suggestion that a candy cane tree (as seen in Tim Burton's take on Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) should be made with curly bits of chicken wire or red and white vinyl twirling beautifully off and sprouting little candy cane on the ground. Or the possibility that a snake eating a Christmas tree should have black material sown onto it rather than paint with black fibre paint was met with a cutting look and a subsequent argument discussing the intricacies and outricacies of Paint vs. Material. All the while I would be thinking, of all the things I imagined myself arguing a case for, painting a snake that has swallowed a Christmas present and is in the process of eating a Christmas tree certainly wasn't one of them.
We got on with it however and continued our work. Kate's main task was making the ten foot high knobbly trees that would frame the stage from either side, mine, after the gravestones, was making the coffin sleigh and helping Karen with the 35 square metre backdrop that we were creating. Karen was also making the skeletal reindeer to go in front of the sleigh (although at this point I would like to make it clear that a number of the reindeer's femurs were created by myself. Day in day out would this constantly be on our minds, any free time we had was a break from cutting out pieces of foam or papier macheing onto chicken wire. As wonderfully fulfilling as my telemarketing job was, I jumped at the chance to give it up and dedicate all of my time to making the set for the show. The only downside from this, aside from not having a wage any more, will be that I will no longer enjoy the conversations between some of my coworkers. To briefly put on show just a small fraction of their ever impressive displays of stupidity and digress for a moment, I give you a few short examples.
[1] You know that game where you write down famous people's names on a bit of paper and stick them to each other's foreheads so they have to guess who they are by asking questions where only yes or no is the answer? You do? Excellent, well one day a few of the gang in PHM decided to play, and one poor sap was the Hunchback of Notre Dam. 'Interesting', I thought, 'showing a little bit of literary culture and not plucking for the usual Britney Wossname or some other forgettable celebrity. Until they started talking.....
"Um...am I American?"
"...."
"Yes."
[2 ] "Did you know when Christopher Columbus first landed in Australia he killed like, loads of Aboriginals?"
[3] "...well, my long-term plan is to be like, a rapper and stuff, and be like fool hardy* like 50 Cent and stuff. He's like the dawg man and you know I got some rhymes if you wanna listen..." (don't worry I shall spare you).
*by 'full hardy' the chap is not referring to the adjective meaning, to be marked by unthinking boldness or to possess defiant disregard for danger or consequences. In this case the term 'full hardy' refers to being 'down with it' as they say, 'on the street', otherwise known as 'cool'.
So yeah, I'm going to miss that place, I'm especially going to miss what's his face, and that other one, you know, that guy. I shall be aiming to get a new job in the New Year and I shall die horribly in a police shoot out whilst wearing nothing but a thong before I go back to telemarketing.
Time marched on however and the list of things that had been done was very slowly dwindling. When I mean we relied on lists, I mean we relied on lists. To make a coffin sleigh for example, one could not simply write "make coffin sleigh" into the Book of the Many Lists. There would be coffin sleigh related heading, with sub categories as to many different aspects that made up the coffin sleigh. The a new list to accommodate what had to be bought to make each of these sections to the whole. Now, some of you will inevitably be asking yourselves, or questioning your computer screen with the words "What on Earth is a coffin sleigh". Well, aside from obviously being a sleigh made out of a coffin, you'll have to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas to get a decent mental image of what were trying to create, and understand its relevance to the show. I won't go into explaining what we were making, you'll have to just take my word for it that skeletal reindeer, flying ghost dogs and parachuting army candy were all necessary.
The workload was immense, and we were exceptionally busy for a lot of the time. Kate was happy multi-tasking as only the girls can do, watching Mel Brooks comedies while working on the trees, but even the comic genius of watching dancing Nazis just didn't cut it for me. I usually worked under the house, and mostly at night, as during the day we were buying the materials and it was too hot to do anything too exerting. The coffin sleigh probably took the longest to do, as it had so many parts to it. Firstly we made a wodden frame around a coffin base that was found in a scrap shop and then I covered it in black plastic cardboard, making the side panels and a curved lid which I was quite rpoud of, even if it was a little off center. Then it was spray painted, with struts coming out the back of it to support a large barrel that was attached behind and filled with (empty) boxes of presents. Then I made Jack Skellington and stuck him at the head of coffin, ready to ride the coffin sleigh to victory and into the hearts and minds of the fans. The reindeer were later attached at the venue, with lots of fiddly wires. Then it was all strung together with rope and wire and raised from the floor to be elevated beside the stage, that was done with a lot me yelling to the Power That Was in the rafters, "woah...little bit...okay...raise his head bit...stop...no back a bit...okay...now his ass...just a little...easy....okay."
When it was all raised, I have to say we three stepped back and were pretty impressed with ourselves. It looked like the coffin sleigh, it really did look well. But that was nothing. We had rolled out the backdrop on the floor to dust off dirt and touch it up a little, and all those present were suitaby impressed. It's the first time I've actually heard a collective gasp of amazement by a group of people. Karen and I laid out our 35 square metre work of art that we had painted in a small room no bigger than five square metres and looked at each other with big cheesy grins of beaming smugness. Even seeing it on the floor wasn't the best thing however, when it was raised behind the stage, to take its position as the backdrop for the night, even I was tacken aback by how good it looked. It really did look professional. We had captured the essence of the archetypal Nightmare Before Christmas scene.
The hour was getting closer and for the first time, staring at the set that only three people had created in just over a month, my confidence that we were going to pull it off was growing. Every time a trickle of doubt entered my mind that something would go wrong, I looked at the stage and my confidence grew that little bit more. The sleigh was in place, hanging from the ceiling, the pumpkins I had carved that morning had finally ben painted by some kind soul, the gravestones were all tentatively placed around the equipment on stage, the trees had their final touches of cobwebs strewn over them, the backdrop was continuing to look great. Everything was ready, now it was up to the band and the people at the Judith Wright Centre to do our set justice.
And then with about 15 minutes to go we were told the sound engineer hadn't arrived.....
[to be concluded, as they say....]