Why do we do all this again?
Listen to the stage manager and get on stage when they tell you to. No one has time for the rock star act. None of the techs backstage care if you're David Bowie or the milkman. When you act like a jerk, they are completely unimpressed with the infantile display that you might think comes with your dubious status. They were there hours before you building the stage, and they will be there hours after you leave tearing it down. They should get your salary and you should get theirs.
--Lollapalooza Alumni Henry Rollins
A Stagehand and a Lighting Designer stood under the same falling truss and both were killed. They arrived in heaven together (all techies go to heaven...) and at the doorstep, St. Peter shook their hands and asked for their last wishes. The LD was the quickest of the two, and said: "In all my life, I've always dreamt of the complete darkness. Could you please turn off all the lights for just one second?" St. Peter said that might be difficult, but he turned on his headset and asked God if he could take down the grandmaster for a second. Fortunately, God was in the mood that day, due to enough coffee at the lightconsole so he tapped the BO key. It went far beyond dark for a second, but when the light turned back on, heaven was gone as the stagehand had changed the scenery...
An actor without techies is a naked person standing in the dark trying to emote; a techie without actors is a person with marketable skills
Actors are props with dialogue. If it's lost an actor will trip over it, if you say not to touch it, they'll touch it, actors are like kids growing up, no real regard for the rules and just want to do their own thing.
Show me a script that calls for no actors, dancers, musicians or artists and I will show you a techie's DREAM
And on the first day the lord said...Lx1, Go! and there was light.
Do what the director tells you to do, then do it the right way.
First law of theatre: everything will take longer than it should
Second law of theatre: if it weren't for the last minute nothing would get done
Third law of theatre: Glory may be fleeting but obscurity lasts forever
Lord, grant me the Serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, the Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to hide the bodies of those actors I had to kill because they pissed me off.
Okay, I think it is fairly clear that I am in a bit of a techie snit today. I had the officer meeting from hell where I discovered that my fellow officers are apathetic and that my director thinks she is sponsoring a group of homosexual women. She seems to be ignorning the fact that I graduate this year and that when I do, she no longer has a trained techie, but won't let me train new techies. She bitches at me for doing things wrong but won't let me do them right. She seems like she wants the troupe to fall apart, even as she says she's working towards permanence.
I want to make it something great, something admired, hell, I'll settle for decent. My officers claim to be dedicated but clearly want nothing more than to get out of the meeting and socialize.
They aren't really dedicated and it is going to take everything I've got to keep this program from collapsing.
Sigh.
I'm not sure how much of that I mean, since I'm still pretty angry, but all of it (factwise) is true. Sucks, eh? Oh well...I have to survive, so I will.
Peace love, headsets and free salsa