Return of the Roller Trees.

We are now about five weeks into our preparations for “Into the Woods.”  The roller skating trees I feared disappeared quickly, but then reappeared without warning a week ago.  I still am concerned that we may have serious injury and that the whole thing will look just plain silly; but onward we go.

How did it happen?  Initially, we were able to convince the director that we could produce rolling tree units with human operators that could animate the branches and give the trees life.  The reason she wanted the trees was sound.  The forest was to become a character in the story, directing and influencing the characters as they tried to make their way through the forest.  This plan would allow her to accomplish that same feeling with far less risk of injury.  She reluctantly agreed. 

Onward we go.  The director continually requests more complexity, texture, and dimensionality.   All good things, but not cheap in terms of cost or labor.  We are an academic theatre, so labor is free, but limited in skill and hours available.  Additionally, our budget is woefully inadequate.  We are in a new larger space, but our budget suffered the same 15% cut that the entire university was subject to despite our new larger need for money.  We have no stock, or soft goods in scale with the space since this is our first production here.  And since it is the first, the expectation is that we will dazzle the audience with what we are capable of with our fancy new theatre.  We know this going in, so our program director has begged (and I do mean begged in a degrading way) and gotten a bit more money.  The masonite to cover the floor so we can paint it and materials to make a plain black portal completely devour the extra funds.  Now, we still have an essentially empty space and the same old budget we started with.  Onward we go.

Oblivious to the cost of what she is asking, the director keeps asking for more and I keep drawing.  I am sent back to revise everything at one point to alter the overall look.  She wants a less lyrical look, more scary/gothic, less romantic.   Fine, no problem, but perhaps this should have been said a few weeks ago before I think I am on the right track and spend two weeks sketching?

At last the technical director produces an estimate for the cost of the set.  It is a mere 50%  over the budget for the ENTIRE season, and not all of the costs have been accounted for yet.  There is shock, surprise, and emergency meetings.  The technical director and I are NOT surprised.  And go to work cutting.  The director gets a weird attitude and declares “I never wanted that anyway” several times.  We cut the Prince’s horse, the carriage, scale back on a moving ground row that would travel as we went in and out of the woods, major cuts are made to the trees that are to frame to portal.  Then we get to the living trees.  With an “I told you so” tone, she points out the trees made as costumes for skaters would be far cheaper than the mobile scenic trees.  She is right.  We re-hash the safety issues, and get her to agree that if adequate skating skills do not exist in the casting pool, the trees will be on foot, and not on skates.  (Why didn’t we think of this before?  The speed and fluid progress of skaters was so attractive to the director she would not let go of the idea of wheels prior to our budget “surprise”.)

You might think that I would be totally unhappy about this compromise.  I’ll confess to having a pretty ” we are all going to hell in a hand basket” attitude for a few days.  Then as I was drawing the tree that holds the spirit of Cinderella’s mother for the third time, I had a new thought.  We already had people dressed as trees.  Why couldn’t one of the tree/actors be Cinderella’s mother instead of building something additional that would need lots of special effects help to make it seem magical?  I quickly found the director, technical director, and costume designer and asked them the same question.  All agreed it was a win/win/win/win.  Less scenery, no additional costumes, an original solution and stage time for some one who would’ve only been an offstage voice.  My secret bonus, one less chunk of scenery to draft and paint!

This idea also has an added conceptual bonus.  Since we decided that the forest had a will of its own, the scenic trees began more and more to take on human qualities as I drew them.  Branches looked like arms, thick roots like legs, knot holes shaped like eyes.  I had never objected to the forest as a character idea.  But until now the forest was only being mischievous, or “nebby” as they say here.  Now there is a connection to the characters in the play.  If one of the trees held the spirit of Cinderella’s mother, the other trees could hold spirits too.  The Baker is burdened with a curse inflicted on his parents and then passed to him.  Wouldn’t their spirits want to help him?  Of course they would.  Now the forest has a real motivation, and has something at stake too.  THAT is the thing that will make the idea work.

So am I happy?  Not that simple.  I guess I would say I am rooting for the idea to work now.  I have enthusiasm for the project again, despite the fact that I hope the skates are ditched and we go on foot.  I am still nervous about the budget, and the skates.   But onward we go. . . .

My Side . . .

I went to visit a close friend recently. A few days after I arrived home this post appeared on her newly launched blog.  I’m here to tell you that I am not brave, just lucky, and this is how it happened.

Let’s jump back, almost 25 years (holy SH*T, I am I really old enough to say that?)  I am attending Smallish State College with a really awesome music program.  Am I there to study theatre?   No.  I am there because I have some misguided idea that there might be a back door to the music education program for which I am too chicken to audition.  While I am searching for aforementioned “back door”, I find myself spending a lot of time with the theatre program, and liking it.  (Right now you are saying, whAAAAT?  Wasn’t she too chicken to audition for the music program?  Guess what?  No audition needed to build and paint scenery.)  So, after two years, zero back doors, and loads of laughs, I declare a theatre major.  After all, I’m having a blast and I have all the classes I need so far. (And I haven’t touched my saxophone in two years.)

At this point I get a little serious and consider transferring to another school closer to “The City”.  I think,  if I am serious and want to “Make it”, Smallish State College really is not going to cut it.  This “period of consideration” lasted about a week.  My major complication?   Love.  I was already engaged and frankly couldn’t bear to leave his side.  Around the same time I also considered a psychology major, or minor (as a back up).  Mostly because it was kind of interesting and I had most of those classes too.  Ultimately, I decided it was too much work.

The love of my life was quite driven and has arranged by his junior year to attend grad school at  Major University.  So naturally, I applied there and no where else.  Fortunately, they had a theatre program too.  I studied hard for my GRE.  Not because I was ambitious, but because I liked being a student and didn’t really want to leave the academic world.  To my great surprise I was accepted into the MFA program and awarded a teaching fellowship.

So, now I’m in grad school studying scene design at Major University,  AND I”M REALLY BAD AT IT!  I’m under-prepared for grad school and my first produced design is a disaster.  I took a lot of pictures. (Hey! Remember film?)  Almost none of them came out and I was glad.  No record of my folly.

Summer.  A lot of time to think.  My husband (oh, I forgot to mention we married the summer before grad school.)  spends all his time in the lab.  I am working a night job and completely unsure if I will return for year number two.  So, what to do?  I want badly to start a family.   But, we are young, and we know it and decide to wait.  I think about other jobs.  None of them are appealing enough to keep me from theatre, even if it is bad theatre of my own making.  And it seems a good way to keep busy until we can have our family.

I return to school for two more years.  Perhaps I am more relaxed and more focused because I have convinced myself that I am just passing time until the next phase of my life can begin.  I improve, a lot.

So, now I somehow have earned an MFA.  I need to stay in town because my husband is still two and a half years away from his PhD.  The professional theatre associated with the university hires me as a properties artisan.  As I graduate, the current employee leaves.  Lucky me.

For the next two and a half years I make stuff.  ALL kinds of stuff.  Pillows, curtains, puppets, fake food, fake bear skin rugs.  I learn how to to dye fabric, upholster furniture, and  navigate the stormy politics of a professional theatre company.   I learn more than I ever could’ve in grad school.  And, although I don’t know it at the time, it is my dream job.

The only thing that could drag me from my dream job was, the next part of my life.  Hubby finishes his P.h.D. and we leave town for his post-doctoral position.  I am excited.  A bigger city, with many more opportunities to work in theatre.  But, the most exciting part is we are now grownups, school is done, and I hope to start the family I have been waiting for.

We move soon after Thanksgiving. Three days to unpack. On the forth day, job hunting.  I find two part-time jobs within two days.  Cool.  Now I can look for theatre work.

By mid-January I have found two theatre gigs.  One is a design job at Painfully Small Community Theatre.  The  second is the props coordinator at Big Time Theatre Company.  I had been hired to do props because 5 of the 6 productions would use sets that were already built; this meant there was no set designer on staff to design the needed props for the shows.  Prop packages for rental sets are notoriously full of holes, and certainly don’t address the needs of a director who was probably 10 years old when the set was built.  I was a hole plugger.  (Picture small dutch boy next to the cracked dike.)

Six musicals in one summer, each show only has one or two weeks to prepare.  This is actually a very typical summer stock schedule.  What made this job challenging is the scale and prominence of the company.  The theater’s stage (in sq. feet) is the second largest in the country.  Additionally, I would be a non-union employee of the theatre company directing a union crew.

This was a really hard job.  I considered any day less than 10 hours long an easy day, and they were rare. There were no days off.  I was blessed with a dependable, smart intern and some other experienced staff members who looked out for me and steered me away from trouble more than once.  They also had the uncanny ability to know when to take me out for a beer.  This was the scariest job I had ever attempted and I was actually good at it.  The down side to the job was that it was only for the summer (not that any human could’ve maintained that pace of production year-round) and the demands of the position were hell on a marriage.  At the end of the summer, the crew of union guys I had worked with told me that I had done pretty good, and they wouldn’t mind if I came back next year.  Apparently, this was the first time they had ever offered this invite to someone in my position.  So, you might be thinking that taking on this job was brave.  Actually it was pretty dumb.  I had no idea what I had gotten myself into and was motivated by the fear of someone yelling at me.  There is a LOT of yelling in a place like that.  I don’t respond well to yelling and will do most anything to avoid it, including work 90 or more hours a week.  No wonder I was asked back.  Now I just needed work from August until May.

As the end of the summer and the end of my contract neared I let co-workers know that I was looking for work.  One of them must have listened.  A few days before my contract was over I received a morning phone call at home.  A VERY well trained voice at the other end of the line announced, “Hello, my name is Dr. Well Trained Voice and I hear you are looking for a job.”  I was so stunned I almost hung up.  Turns out one of my co-workers was a faculty member at Local Ultra Large University and Dr. Well Trained Voice had called her to see if she had any recent MFAs looking for work.  She didn’t, but she gave him my name.  He called directory assistance, and then called me.  Dr. Well Trained Voice was the department chair at a theatre program at Pip Squeak Woman’s College just outside of town.  I interviewed for the Scene Designer/ Technical Director / Lighting Design / Teaching/ Half-time position that evening and was offered the job on the spot.  The were not wasting any time, the semester started in two weeks.

There was no logical reason for me to get this job.  I did everything wrong at the interview.  I was not prepared, I was sleep deprived, I knew nothing about the school or the program, my portfolio was a ghastly mess, and I told Dr. Well Trained Voice that I would not be able to keep the position more than two years, and (YES!) there had been others interview for the position.  How I got this job is still a mystery to me.

As I write this I am now starting my 16th year at Pip Squeak Woman’s College which has grown into Small University.  I am still in a half-time position but fortunately wear far fewer hats than I have had to during the first ten years.  I have been asked back to Big Time Theatre Company many times as a props coordinator and more recently to design shows for their smaller side ventures.  I am fortunate  to have a husband that earns a healthy wage so that I can continue what really should be considered a self-supporting hobby.

How did I get here?  Let’s review: 1. I was too lazy in school to pursue an additional major.  2. I went to grad school because that is what my husband was doing. 3. I stayed in grad school because I didn’t know what else to do with myself.  4. I got a job at a professional theatre because I was in the right place at the right time.  5.  I moved to a bigger city to stay with my husband.  6.  I was hired by a Big Theatre Company because only ignorant “new in town” people ever take the job.  7. I was once again in the right place at the right time to get a teaching position.

See.  Nothing happened because I was brave.  Honestly, I had time to pursue theatre because having a family did not come quickly or easily even once we got around to trying.  I needed to stay busy to stay sane.  That bad luck ended up having a very positive effect on my career.  It is not the life I would’ve picked, but it is the one I have.

This is the really frustrating thing about teaching theatre.  No matter how hard you work, or how “talented” you may be, it really just all depend on dumb luck.

Into a New Year

The next school year will soon be upon us. OK, what I mean is ME. We had our first production meeting on Friday for the season. First show is “Into the Woods.” I LOVE THIS SHOW! I am not typically a fan of musicals, but if you need to do one, this is one worth doing. More than shallow entertainment, and great music. I was thrilled when the play selection committee agreed that this would open our season AND our new performing arts center.

I went into the meeting with high hopes. But it didn’t last long. I have worked with this director before and should have known I would be unhappy. Her concept? Actors in tree costumes on roller skates. “I think it will eliminate the need for a lot of scenery.” There I sit thinking “WOW, I guess you don’t want scenery!? Maybe I should leave now and save us both a lot of pain and suffering.”

I kept my cool as usual. It will be a semester filled with “educational” moments. Wish me luck.

This Old Blog

I have not posted a thing in months. I have not even read a blog in about three months. For a long time I did not miss blogging, but recently I have started to think about it again.

I have spent a lot of time on facebook recently catching up with students from the past. It has been fun, but it is my teacher face. Here I can be as flawed and unreasonable as I like, rant, rave, and be the entire me. Here I can interact with people I don’t know and learn so much more than people I already know can teach me.

It is odd, I can hardly navigate Word Press. I have not been gone a year and I feel very much like I am starting all over again. Maybe I should start a whole new blog? But, I’m still the same person who wrote all that other stuff, so the same blog will do.

I have a lot of work to do to fix up this blog. Links are out of date, I’ve read SO many books, and my weight loss info? HA! GIve me some time to get this old blog spruced up and then come back and see it. I hope it will be worth the click.

True to Holiday Form

I’ve been bouncing ideas around in my head for that annual form letter to send ’round to the more distant family and friends. You know the one, where you try to sum up the whole year in a single clever page? Usually goes something like this.

Hey Folks!, We are all Hallmark happy and fuzzy here.  Everything is a Kodak moment and we are all thinner, happier and better employed than ever before.

I don’t write a holiday letter every year.  But, I do actually enjoy getting them.  It is so nice to hear how well those people you knew (better, once) are doing now.  I especially like the ones with lots of photos of the kids.  Christmas cards are nice, they are pretty, you can hang them up so you can play “Look how many people care enough about ME to send a card.” with visiting neighbors.  But I prefer the letters, even a form letter seems pretty intimate compared to the flourish of a signature you only see once a year.  

Currently, the only person we get a card from that contains more than a single handwritten line (All the best in the New Year!) and a signature is from the woman we bought our house from more than 10 years ago.  She normally fills that whole left side of the card with a real hand written note.  She writes about the weather in Florida, what she noticed about our house the last time she came North to visit friends, just random, unimportant stuff.  But strangely I treasure those cards.  So, much effort just to say “Hi” to someone she hardly knows.  I guess that is I why I feel like a form letter is the least I should produce. Not to mention that maybe somebody else might be sappy enough to enjoy it.

I’m a bit more motivated to write it this year because I have real news to share.  But it is bad news.  Do I break the “Happy Hallmark” tradition and just put it all out there?  ”Adoptions in Vietnam have closed.  We are S.O.L and feeling too beat up by the process to continue on to other options.”  Or do I continue the illusion that tradition demands?  Those who know us well, know the situation.  Should I just send a cheery note saying “We are GREAT!  We are doing just GREAT!  No need to worry about us.”  and ease the minds of those who care?  But, that leaves the vague masses uninformed, and leaves me answering the “Are you still going to adopt? and Why not?” questions for a long time to come.  That may not seem like a bad option until you consider that emotionally those questions sound like “Hey, how’s that dead baby doin’?” to me.  

Realistically, I just need to pretend that all is hunky-dory.  That kind of news is just not meant for a Holiday Greeting.  But it sure would be nice just to unload that baggage because I am so tired of lugging it around.

 

What I am thankful for.

“When you are troubled and cannot sleep, just count your blessings instead of sheep.”

As I head into the holiday season, I am once again in the battle to remain positive. So in the spirit of Thanksgiving I am listing my blessings in no particular order.

• My husband, who is beyond compare, who has been by my side through thick and thin, who does dishes, laundry, cooks and knows that when I ask for “rocks for my birthday” I mean landscaping rock and NOT diamonds.
• My son, who healed my heart, makes me laugh and smile daily, and makes me want to be a better person each day.
• A home, my cozy house and garden that has been a nest for my happy family.
• A job that I love to do and an employer who has been tolerant of my families needs.
• An education paid for by grants not loans.
• Parents who taught me the value of hard work, and self-reliance.
• The opportunity to travel and see first hand how others in the world live.  
• The ability to cope with the things that are not blessings.

I know that all these things are cliché and unremarkable.  They are the same blessings that many of us have in common.  As I look over this list, however, the subtraction of anyone of these things would make my life very different, and in most cases much more difficult.  And so, for these things I am thankful.