Chapter 19 - "...not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse."
"Orchestral Sci-Fi art rock act The Red Paintings will be holding a one-off event Christmas Party called The Nightmare Before Christmas Show, dedicated to director Tim Burton and his amazing films - (Edward Scissor Hands, Willy Wonka, Beetle Juice, Mars Attacks, and the Nightmare Before Christmas-to name A few).
There will be many surprises, crazy sets from Burton movies and Xmas gifts for the first 100 in the door.
The band will be dressing up as characters from Tim Burton's films- feel free to join in on the fun!
Tickets are limited - only 350 available. This show will sell out fast- purchase soon to avoid disappointment.
This is an all ages event. Start making your Tim Burton inspired costume - it's going to be an amazing party to end the year with!
WARNING- this show includes the use of; strobe lighting, smoke machines, visual & screen images containing horror & adult themes."
...or so the badly worded press release spiel read.
I was amused when I first read that press release. We had a lot to live up to, our sets had to be "crazy". No normal looking slanted and malformed gravestones or average coffin sleighs for us, they had to be "crazy". The fact there never were, nor ever planned, any smoke machines or strobe lighting didn't really matter of course, you can never warn people about these things enough.
Aside from the Nightmare Before Christmas stuff going on inside, we had to deck out the foyer of the place in brighter and more up beat style so we went for a whole merry Christmas Town feel, with dashes of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory thrown in. So amongst the sea of fairy lights, tinsel and fake snow were waves of lollipops and candy treats for the more perceptible ones to enjoy. It was as we were setting up the foyer that we encountered our next great bout of hindrance and ineptitude. On the contract with the JWC and on the promotional poster that was made for the show, it said that doors opened at seven.
It was then that we encountered what can only be described as the lovechild of Heinrich Himmler and Myra Hindley. I didn't catch her name but it was something along the lines of Siobhan, it would only had to have been. She looked like a grossly malnourished Judderman with a penchant for being difficult. As mentioned, doors were supposed to open at seven, and even though the main doors had been open all day despite us requesting them locked, we didn't want anyone to go up the steps to the main foyer. The fact that very early fans who showed up at six could catch a glimpse of the backside of the bassist for the band as she hoovered up the steps didn't help either. We didn't want to start letting them in until a bit of a crowd had gathered and we had finished everything. Brief arguments were had and no compromises were met, they just went ahead and opened the doors, and so it was like somebody had just finished constructing their rickety hut on the beach just before a tsunami came and obliterated it. Despite everyone who spoke to Myra "The Judderman" Himmler coming away with a bitter taste of poison in their mouth, we were just happy that almost everything we had planned for was finished and waiting to be devoured by the ravenous masses.
For the foyer the only thing that didn't get done was that candy cane tree, alas, those arguments had been for nothing. Instead I spiralled red streamers down three massive pillars inside the foyer and gaffer taped candy canes to the base as if they were sprouting from the ground. Otherwise our vision had mostly come to life, up one banister slithered a snake with a Christmas teddy bear in his stomach whilst another on the opposite banister tucked into a silver Christmas tree. Further up came the mass of fairy lights and tinsel, with cardboard cut outs of misshapen lamp posts and curvy snow-covered trees. One of mine and Karen's favourite touches to the foyer however was something we thought up at the very last minute and something that was still being tidied as the stampede of black eyelinered and depressed middle class teenagers made its way up the steps; our Tortured Willow. We had planned to use it in place of a Toffee Apple Tree but we simply had no time to spray paint all of the branches, nor make the toffee apples themselves. What we created was a beautiful little corner of the room that we covered in snow and decorated with little icicles that looked like something out of Sleepy Hollow. Of course most people just walked past it, but as I walked through the foyer at the height of it being full of people later in the night, I was proudly staring at my little bit of Christmas surrounded by all the lights and loud colours but maintaining something natural (although not that natural, it was dead after all, and sprayed with fake snow and covered in plastic icicles).
So, as all the fans made their way through the candy in the foyer and oohed and aahed over the pretty shiny light things all around them, final preparations were being made backstage, and the sound engineer still hadn't arrived. We finally managed to get in touch with him and he was yelling back that he couldn't find anywhere to park. That was understandable as Dallas, the tour manager for the band had already gotten a ticket once when we parked around the back of the place for our first and last meeting with the technical director who turned out to never plan on being there on the night. So yes, ineptitude was being passed around amongst the staff of the JWC in bucket loads. The only reliable one was Corin, who I'll mention more later.
Before the show started, people could come into the theatre and mill about whilst they waited for the Red Paintings to come on, and I've never seen people actually point at something they find amazing and nudge other people to look as well. I thought that kind of thing was only enacted by poor extras in overblown Hollywood blockbusters. But no, these people were sauntering into the theatre, noticing the coffin sleigh and pointing at it. They were (and rightly so) impressed with how good it looked. As Karen, Kate, and I stood beside a curtain just behind the stage and watched these people come in and look amazed, Danny Elfman's beautiful music from Edward Scissorhands began to play and I have to say it was an extremely memorable moment, one of the highlights of the evening. The haunting rising and falling of the soundtrack fit the mood of the room perfectly and married the soft purple and green lighting in the theatre. Smugness was overloading in my membrane and I was resisting the urge to shatter the moment for everybody and scream "Me!! All me!! Gahahah! See this? Me!" But no, the room looked amazing, and the curtain for the main stage hadn't even been raised yet.
The minutes ticked down and the people slowly filed in from the foyer to the main theatre after the instantly forgettable support band packed up to go home, the sound technician was locking his car and rushing to enter the sound booth and the curtain was ready to be raised on a night we had been working for and consumed by for many weeks. We rushed into the the main theatre for the opening of the show, to see it as if we were part of the audience. But of course we weren't, we had planned the opening of the show with the front man on his computer, deciding what would happen and how the lighting would work. As I sat there, going over with him what would happen, I always thought something would go wrong, but gave a resounding 'yes' to everything because I knew it wouldn't be my fault.
So as Jamie, the front man for the Red Paintings, got out of a coffin on stage and his friend Eric dressed as Edward Scissorhands handed him a guitar, and the spotlights did their job perfectly, I was amazed firstly that it was actually working, and things were looking theatrical, and secondly at how quick the opening to the show was. The way we had talked about it made it seem like it would be some drawn out mini epic that would end up boring the masses and ushering them back into the foyer to feed their fat faces on yet more Willy Wonka treats. But it worked, everything we had planned worked. Jamie (dressed as Jack Skellington) got out of the coffin, looked around a bit, was handed his guitar, the rest of the band (dressed as other characters from Nightmare Before Christmas) played their part perfectly. Everything was coming together, the sound wasn't the best and the theatre wasn't as full as we had hoped (even though the show was sold out), but it was working. It wasn't too theatrical, but it was big enough for people to be taken aback and experience a show they had never done so before.
So for the first half of the show we could relax....and by relax I mean spend the first half worrying about the intermission. For we had decided to put snow on everything while the curtain was up for the interval. So as soon as the curtain closed, Karen, Kate and I had to rush around, minding not to knock over any band equipment or band member. The ladders were brought out and we started spraying snow onto the backdrop, adding glitter to it to make it look more noticeable. We had planned to put fake snow on the stage, but as soon as a can of spray on snow was applied to the backdrop, the cloud of the stuff swirled out and any that didn't go down our throats or up our noses landed on everything else. All the fake snow that was thrown at the glue on the 3D objects looked great and exactly how we wanted it. However the snow on the backdrop didn't come of quite as we had imagined it. We had bought about 15 cans of spray on snow to use and found that when you're frantically trying to snow something as big as a 35 square metre back drop, the can seems to last approximately 3.4 seconds.
I was happy with it because, as Kate made a good point in saying, we had expectations of how it would look, and it didn't live up to our expectations, but the slobbering mass of fans had no idea there would even be a set change half way through, so it could only have looked good. And over all it did, it looked great. Karen took a little longer to convince, and was almost in tears because she was sure she'd ruined the backdrop, (at this point I thought maybe I should try humour. But suppressed the thought of saying "No no, don't be silly, we ruined the backdrop, ho ho ho!). I gave her another drink and she was apples, ready to once again smugly mingle amongst the crowd.
Now that the intermission was over, everyone could relax, well, of course, everyone except me. I still had a job to do, and, without feeling any pressure, it was going to be one of the set pieces that ended the whole night with and would ultimately be one of the most memorable. I was just worried that it might be memorable because something would go drastically wrong, things would catch fire and there would be many dead or dying children by the end of the night (but that was thinking too optimistically).
Earlier in the day Kate had broken the band's blender by blending up lots of line paper which we had planned to use as snow that would drop at the end of the night. Thankfully it broke when we had just about enough, so, that in hand, I went up to the rafters of the theatre and put it in the snow machine. It was pretty much a long piece of cloth in the shape of a U that spanned the length of the stage, with holes all the way along that, when you shook by pulling on a rope, emptied out the snow in little bit. Initially we had hoped that the snow would fall on the stage and the front row of the audience but when we tested it out it was only going to drop onto the stage so I went back up to the rafters with the most pointless little fan and set it beside the fan, realising the futility of my actions.
So that had all been set up earlier in the day, and that was left to be done was for me to balls the whole thing up. Everyone else, happy and relaxed that all their work was done, enjoyed the rest of the gig, and the penultimate piece of theatrics we had planned before my snowfall. In the film, Jack Skellington is shot out of the sky by those nasty human folk, and falls to earth, apaprently dead. Lying in the arms of a stone grave in the shape of an angel, he begins to lament what has happened. This was the plan for the opening of the second half of the show. We managed to convince the tour manager Dallas to dress up as the Angel and carry Jamie for about three minutes while he started singing whatever song he opened with after the intermission. In rehearsal there had been a few complications, which mostly involved Jamie rubbing his backside on the floor, but after the curtain came up, it all went to plan. Not that I was aware of any of this, I was packing away all the snow spraying related items and was back stage fretting over the blasted snow fall. Indeed for the rest of the gig I was pacing up and down behind the backdrop.
Corin, the technical director for the night, had showed me what to do earlier, all I had to do was tug on the two bits of rope really hard and everything would be fine. As the final song was just about to start, I found Corin standing beside the rope, he looked at me and said, "You're up!" So, as the Red Paintings finished the show with a cover of Mad World, the audience were wowed by gentle flakes of snow dropping to the ground, and then as the song picked up, the sow began to fall a bit heavier, until there was a bit of a blizzard on stage, and then, just as quickly as it had arrived, the snow dissipated to another gentle drift as the song wound up. That was of course, a very different scene to what was going on back stage. It turned out you had to really tug the two ropes to get snow to fall, and so the reason there was gentle snowfall at the start was because I didn't judge just how much effort I needed to put into it. Then when the song really kicked in I decided to empty the whole thing and get the snowfall as thick as possible. It was when I fingers began to burn and I noticed a blister that had formed about thiry seconds ago had burst already that I thought I was getting into this a little too much. Thankfully the adrenalin of the night didn't really make it that painful (something I paid for the next day).
Later I was told that the snowfall really set the whole thing off and ended the night perfectly, and that apparently there were people with tears in their eyes. Now, I'm well aware that you only have to look at an emo* kid in the wrong way and they'll start bawling, but I still took it as a compliment.
*For the slightly more mature of my readership, a youth described as emo is one who wears a black side parting that very specifically covers one eye, converse training shoes, mostly black clothing or a daring combination of red and black, and almost impossibly tight jeans (for the male species of emo this is particularly confusing as the tightness of these jeans suggests the absence of genitalia). They claim to be emotionally motivated (hence the 'emo') but in fact are motivated by nothing at all, except the desire to be seen to be depressed. This is therefore the reason why they hang around town halls and street corners, waiting for people with jobs to walk past so they can flash them an unhappy face. Emokids are basically all the angst, depression and self-loathing of a Goth crammed into a pathetically meek nerd.
And so it was that the night was an unparalleled success, the band had lost money, we had lost money, everyone had had no sleep, stress levels were at an all time high, we were just about ready to kill each other, but we felt absolutely amazing because we had done something that nobody in Brisbane had done before. A local band that is not majorly known throughout the world had put on a show that would even rival U2 stepping out of a 35ft lemon. The sets looked amazing, the band's costumes set off their surroundings brilliantly, the crowd participation was fantastic, and the night ended spectacularly. Almost everything we had set out to do was achieved, and the sense of joy we felt was incomparable.
Even after being told we only had half an hour to clear everything away, and having another argument with the Judderman, even that couldn't quell our happiness. We still came away somewhat miffed that the organisers only allowed 350 tickets to be sold when we could have shifted double that. Looking at the theatre was disappointing as it was only half full, and we could have actually made some money if we had sold as many tickets as we wanted, which we would have. The people at the JWC were very unaccommodating and seemed to try and be difficult at every opportunity, which was baffling seeing as we were paying them quite a lot of money to help us put on a fantastic Christmas show. One lesson that was learned was never to think anyone is out to help you, even when you're paying them, which is a sad state of affairs, but true.
There is so much else that happened that I haven't gone into however, the night really was packed full of stuff, dancing pinatas suspended from the rafters and an Opera singing Santa Claus to name a few more, but apparently there is a DVD coming out soon, so you can all make us some money by buying it. There are a few photos of the night floating around but they were taken by fans and so almost by definition they're not very good. I'll find some photos of the professional photographers that were floating around and maybe show you some day. As for now, I am incredibly tired and so shall commence my hibernation. But at least I can go to bed content, and with a smile on my face, because this was one of the best Christmases I have had for a long time.
Goodnight.
There will be many surprises, crazy sets from Burton movies and Xmas gifts for the first 100 in the door.
The band will be dressing up as characters from Tim Burton's films- feel free to join in on the fun!
Tickets are limited - only 350 available. This show will sell out fast- purchase soon to avoid disappointment.
This is an all ages event. Start making your Tim Burton inspired costume - it's going to be an amazing party to end the year with!
WARNING- this show includes the use of; strobe lighting, smoke machines, visual & screen images containing horror & adult themes."
...or so the badly worded press release spiel read.
I was amused when I first read that press release. We had a lot to live up to, our sets had to be "crazy". No normal looking slanted and malformed gravestones or average coffin sleighs for us, they had to be "crazy". The fact there never were, nor ever planned, any smoke machines or strobe lighting didn't really matter of course, you can never warn people about these things enough.
Aside from the Nightmare Before Christmas stuff going on inside, we had to deck out the foyer of the place in brighter and more up beat style so we went for a whole merry Christmas Town feel, with dashes of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory thrown in. So amongst the sea of fairy lights, tinsel and fake snow were waves of lollipops and candy treats for the more perceptible ones to enjoy. It was as we were setting up the foyer that we encountered our next great bout of hindrance and ineptitude. On the contract with the JWC and on the promotional poster that was made for the show, it said that doors opened at seven.
It was then that we encountered what can only be described as the lovechild of Heinrich Himmler and Myra Hindley. I didn't catch her name but it was something along the lines of Siobhan, it would only had to have been. She looked like a grossly malnourished Judderman with a penchant for being difficult. As mentioned, doors were supposed to open at seven, and even though the main doors had been open all day despite us requesting them locked, we didn't want anyone to go up the steps to the main foyer. The fact that very early fans who showed up at six could catch a glimpse of the backside of the bassist for the band as she hoovered up the steps didn't help either. We didn't want to start letting them in until a bit of a crowd had gathered and we had finished everything. Brief arguments were had and no compromises were met, they just went ahead and opened the doors, and so it was like somebody had just finished constructing their rickety hut on the beach just before a tsunami came and obliterated it. Despite everyone who spoke to Myra "The Judderman" Himmler coming away with a bitter taste of poison in their mouth, we were just happy that almost everything we had planned for was finished and waiting to be devoured by the ravenous masses.
For the foyer the only thing that didn't get done was that candy cane tree, alas, those arguments had been for nothing. Instead I spiralled red streamers down three massive pillars inside the foyer and gaffer taped candy canes to the base as if they were sprouting from the ground. Otherwise our vision had mostly come to life, up one banister slithered a snake with a Christmas teddy bear in his stomach whilst another on the opposite banister tucked into a silver Christmas tree. Further up came the mass of fairy lights and tinsel, with cardboard cut outs of misshapen lamp posts and curvy snow-covered trees. One of mine and Karen's favourite touches to the foyer however was something we thought up at the very last minute and something that was still being tidied as the stampede of black eyelinered and depressed middle class teenagers made its way up the steps; our Tortured Willow. We had planned to use it in place of a Toffee Apple Tree but we simply had no time to spray paint all of the branches, nor make the toffee apples themselves. What we created was a beautiful little corner of the room that we covered in snow and decorated with little icicles that looked like something out of Sleepy Hollow. Of course most people just walked past it, but as I walked through the foyer at the height of it being full of people later in the night, I was proudly staring at my little bit of Christmas surrounded by all the lights and loud colours but maintaining something natural (although not that natural, it was dead after all, and sprayed with fake snow and covered in plastic icicles).
So, as all the fans made their way through the candy in the foyer and oohed and aahed over the pretty shiny light things all around them, final preparations were being made backstage, and the sound engineer still hadn't arrived. We finally managed to get in touch with him and he was yelling back that he couldn't find anywhere to park. That was understandable as Dallas, the tour manager for the band had already gotten a ticket once when we parked around the back of the place for our first and last meeting with the technical director who turned out to never plan on being there on the night. So yes, ineptitude was being passed around amongst the staff of the JWC in bucket loads. The only reliable one was Corin, who I'll mention more later.
Before the show started, people could come into the theatre and mill about whilst they waited for the Red Paintings to come on, and I've never seen people actually point at something they find amazing and nudge other people to look as well. I thought that kind of thing was only enacted by poor extras in overblown Hollywood blockbusters. But no, these people were sauntering into the theatre, noticing the coffin sleigh and pointing at it. They were (and rightly so) impressed with how good it looked. As Karen, Kate, and I stood beside a curtain just behind the stage and watched these people come in and look amazed, Danny Elfman's beautiful music from Edward Scissorhands began to play and I have to say it was an extremely memorable moment, one of the highlights of the evening. The haunting rising and falling of the soundtrack fit the mood of the room perfectly and married the soft purple and green lighting in the theatre. Smugness was overloading in my membrane and I was resisting the urge to shatter the moment for everybody and scream "Me!! All me!! Gahahah! See this? Me!" But no, the room looked amazing, and the curtain for the main stage hadn't even been raised yet.
The minutes ticked down and the people slowly filed in from the foyer to the main theatre after the instantly forgettable support band packed up to go home, the sound technician was locking his car and rushing to enter the sound booth and the curtain was ready to be raised on a night we had been working for and consumed by for many weeks. We rushed into the the main theatre for the opening of the show, to see it as if we were part of the audience. But of course we weren't, we had planned the opening of the show with the front man on his computer, deciding what would happen and how the lighting would work. As I sat there, going over with him what would happen, I always thought something would go wrong, but gave a resounding 'yes' to everything because I knew it wouldn't be my fault.
So as Jamie, the front man for the Red Paintings, got out of a coffin on stage and his friend Eric dressed as Edward Scissorhands handed him a guitar, and the spotlights did their job perfectly, I was amazed firstly that it was actually working, and things were looking theatrical, and secondly at how quick the opening to the show was. The way we had talked about it made it seem like it would be some drawn out mini epic that would end up boring the masses and ushering them back into the foyer to feed their fat faces on yet more Willy Wonka treats. But it worked, everything we had planned worked. Jamie (dressed as Jack Skellington) got out of the coffin, looked around a bit, was handed his guitar, the rest of the band (dressed as other characters from Nightmare Before Christmas) played their part perfectly. Everything was coming together, the sound wasn't the best and the theatre wasn't as full as we had hoped (even though the show was sold out), but it was working. It wasn't too theatrical, but it was big enough for people to be taken aback and experience a show they had never done so before.
So for the first half of the show we could relax....and by relax I mean spend the first half worrying about the intermission. For we had decided to put snow on everything while the curtain was up for the interval. So as soon as the curtain closed, Karen, Kate and I had to rush around, minding not to knock over any band equipment or band member. The ladders were brought out and we started spraying snow onto the backdrop, adding glitter to it to make it look more noticeable. We had planned to put fake snow on the stage, but as soon as a can of spray on snow was applied to the backdrop, the cloud of the stuff swirled out and any that didn't go down our throats or up our noses landed on everything else. All the fake snow that was thrown at the glue on the 3D objects looked great and exactly how we wanted it. However the snow on the backdrop didn't come of quite as we had imagined it. We had bought about 15 cans of spray on snow to use and found that when you're frantically trying to snow something as big as a 35 square metre back drop, the can seems to last approximately 3.4 seconds.
I was happy with it because, as Kate made a good point in saying, we had expectations of how it would look, and it didn't live up to our expectations, but the slobbering mass of fans had no idea there would even be a set change half way through, so it could only have looked good. And over all it did, it looked great. Karen took a little longer to convince, and was almost in tears because she was sure she'd ruined the backdrop, (at this point I thought maybe I should try humour. But suppressed the thought of saying "No no, don't be silly, we ruined the backdrop, ho ho ho!). I gave her another drink and she was apples, ready to once again smugly mingle amongst the crowd.
Now that the intermission was over, everyone could relax, well, of course, everyone except me. I still had a job to do, and, without feeling any pressure, it was going to be one of the set pieces that ended the whole night with and would ultimately be one of the most memorable. I was just worried that it might be memorable because something would go drastically wrong, things would catch fire and there would be many dead or dying children by the end of the night (but that was thinking too optimistically).
Earlier in the day Kate had broken the band's blender by blending up lots of line paper which we had planned to use as snow that would drop at the end of the night. Thankfully it broke when we had just about enough, so, that in hand, I went up to the rafters of the theatre and put it in the snow machine. It was pretty much a long piece of cloth in the shape of a U that spanned the length of the stage, with holes all the way along that, when you shook by pulling on a rope, emptied out the snow in little bit. Initially we had hoped that the snow would fall on the stage and the front row of the audience but when we tested it out it was only going to drop onto the stage so I went back up to the rafters with the most pointless little fan and set it beside the fan, realising the futility of my actions.
So that had all been set up earlier in the day, and that was left to be done was for me to balls the whole thing up. Everyone else, happy and relaxed that all their work was done, enjoyed the rest of the gig, and the penultimate piece of theatrics we had planned before my snowfall. In the film, Jack Skellington is shot out of the sky by those nasty human folk, and falls to earth, apaprently dead. Lying in the arms of a stone grave in the shape of an angel, he begins to lament what has happened. This was the plan for the opening of the second half of the show. We managed to convince the tour manager Dallas to dress up as the Angel and carry Jamie for about three minutes while he started singing whatever song he opened with after the intermission. In rehearsal there had been a few complications, which mostly involved Jamie rubbing his backside on the floor, but after the curtain came up, it all went to plan. Not that I was aware of any of this, I was packing away all the snow spraying related items and was back stage fretting over the blasted snow fall. Indeed for the rest of the gig I was pacing up and down behind the backdrop.
Corin, the technical director for the night, had showed me what to do earlier, all I had to do was tug on the two bits of rope really hard and everything would be fine. As the final song was just about to start, I found Corin standing beside the rope, he looked at me and said, "You're up!" So, as the Red Paintings finished the show with a cover of Mad World, the audience were wowed by gentle flakes of snow dropping to the ground, and then as the song picked up, the sow began to fall a bit heavier, until there was a bit of a blizzard on stage, and then, just as quickly as it had arrived, the snow dissipated to another gentle drift as the song wound up. That was of course, a very different scene to what was going on back stage. It turned out you had to really tug the two ropes to get snow to fall, and so the reason there was gentle snowfall at the start was because I didn't judge just how much effort I needed to put into it. Then when the song really kicked in I decided to empty the whole thing and get the snowfall as thick as possible. It was when I fingers began to burn and I noticed a blister that had formed about thiry seconds ago had burst already that I thought I was getting into this a little too much. Thankfully the adrenalin of the night didn't really make it that painful (something I paid for the next day).
Later I was told that the snowfall really set the whole thing off and ended the night perfectly, and that apparently there were people with tears in their eyes. Now, I'm well aware that you only have to look at an emo* kid in the wrong way and they'll start bawling, but I still took it as a compliment.
*For the slightly more mature of my readership, a youth described as emo is one who wears a black side parting that very specifically covers one eye, converse training shoes, mostly black clothing or a daring combination of red and black, and almost impossibly tight jeans (for the male species of emo this is particularly confusing as the tightness of these jeans suggests the absence of genitalia). They claim to be emotionally motivated (hence the 'emo') but in fact are motivated by nothing at all, except the desire to be seen to be depressed. This is therefore the reason why they hang around town halls and street corners, waiting for people with jobs to walk past so they can flash them an unhappy face. Emokids are basically all the angst, depression and self-loathing of a Goth crammed into a pathetically meek nerd.
And so it was that the night was an unparalleled success, the band had lost money, we had lost money, everyone had had no sleep, stress levels were at an all time high, we were just about ready to kill each other, but we felt absolutely amazing because we had done something that nobody in Brisbane had done before. A local band that is not majorly known throughout the world had put on a show that would even rival U2 stepping out of a 35ft lemon. The sets looked amazing, the band's costumes set off their surroundings brilliantly, the crowd participation was fantastic, and the night ended spectacularly. Almost everything we had set out to do was achieved, and the sense of joy we felt was incomparable.
Even after being told we only had half an hour to clear everything away, and having another argument with the Judderman, even that couldn't quell our happiness. We still came away somewhat miffed that the organisers only allowed 350 tickets to be sold when we could have shifted double that. Looking at the theatre was disappointing as it was only half full, and we could have actually made some money if we had sold as many tickets as we wanted, which we would have. The people at the JWC were very unaccommodating and seemed to try and be difficult at every opportunity, which was baffling seeing as we were paying them quite a lot of money to help us put on a fantastic Christmas show. One lesson that was learned was never to think anyone is out to help you, even when you're paying them, which is a sad state of affairs, but true.
There is so much else that happened that I haven't gone into however, the night really was packed full of stuff, dancing pinatas suspended from the rafters and an Opera singing Santa Claus to name a few more, but apparently there is a DVD coming out soon, so you can all make us some money by buying it. There are a few photos of the night floating around but they were taken by fans and so almost by definition they're not very good. I'll find some photos of the professional photographers that were floating around and maybe show you some day. As for now, I am incredibly tired and so shall commence my hibernation. But at least I can go to bed content, and with a smile on my face, because this was one of the best Christmases I have had for a long time.
Goodnight.