Tale #6: It Was The Slide

When a community theater has been in operation for almost thirty years, you find that it acquires a lot of stuff. From set pieces, to vintage furniture, to costumes, to props, to extra show t-shirts; it just can create a lot of clutter.

Our new building on Lincoln Street was unbelievably spacious compared to our old building on Bruce. However, there was still a limit to how much stuff we could feasibly store.

Whenever we had lull periods, which wasn’t often with our ten show a year schedule, we would take time to go through our inventory and clear out things we didn’t need anymore.

One Saturday afternoon my mom and I decided to tackle the scene shop. We were clearing out stuff in the upstairs storage while the current shop manager, Alex, was working on a project for the current production (could not tell you what production that was).

Important Detail: Our new building was in between the fire station and the city hall/police department building. The city hall had a large dumpster behind their building. My mom had developed good working relationships with multiple city council members from the fundraising efforts. Plus, one of the city council members had children in our program. Therefore, he said we could use their dumpster every so often if we needed to dispose of something larger than what our regulation trash bins could hold.

My mom and I had created a large pile of stuff to get rid of in the parking lot outside of the shop garage. We shoved as much as we could in our own trash bins and hauled those to the curb.

Then we looked at the remaining pile. We figured we could take a few pieces down to the city hall dumpster; taking them up on their generous offer. I mean, people don’t offer things if they don’t want you to take them up on it right?

We loaded a broken end table and a small shelf and headed over to the dumpster. When we opened their very large dumpster, we saw that it was completely empty. There was so much room for more stuff and garbage collection was soon. We figured there was no way they could fill it themselves before collection.

We decided it would be perfectly fine for us to go back and grab a few more things. So we hopped back in the truck, drove the two minutes back to our building, and reloaded. This time we went with a small chandelier that was broken and another shelf.

Back to the dumpster we went to add our additional items. Then we decided we could probably do one more round of stuff. Just one more round couldn’t hurt anything.

It was equivalent to when you are eating candy on a diet. You figure okay, I’ll just have a few pieces. It’s fine. It won’t mess anything up. Then you go for a few more. Then just a couple more. Then before you know it you’ve said “f*** it” and you’ve eaten the entire bag.

I think we made about five trips total to the city hall dumpster. On our final trip, we really went big.

We brought the giant red slide we had been trying to get rid of ever since it’s one and only use in our production of Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka.

We threw the horribly paint-chipped, smelly, full play set regulation-sized slide in the dumpster only to realize by that point we had really filled it. The dumpster would no longer close and the slide was sticking out.

Well, digging stuff back out of the garbage and taking it back to our building was clearly not an option. So we just proceeded to swiftly run away and get on with our day.

We quickly went back to our building so I could get my car. Alex was still working in the shop. We said a quick goodbye and went on our merry ways.

Now Alex had known we were clearing stuff out, but he hadn’t really been paying attention to what exactly we had been doing.

About fifteen minutes after my mom and I left, she got a phone call from Alex. The police had arrived at the VACT building and had some questions about a particularly full dumpster.

So poor Alex, who had no idea what we had done, was standing face to face with three police officers wondering why their dumpster was filled with an assortment of odds and ends including: a giant red slide.

Alex immediately ratted us out, as he should, and proceeded to call my mom to explain that we were in trouble.

My mom then called me laughing in the cringey way you do when you know your in trouble, but not like real trouble. We knew the slide had probably been a bit too much.

They gave us a very stern warning but let us leave all of our stuff in the dumpster. My mom wrote an email to her closest connection on the council (the one who had a child in our program) apologizing greatly for our getting carried away.

Now, I know we pushed the boundaries and I know we got in trouble. However, in the end, we did still get exactly what I wanted. And that was to get rid of the horrible red plastic slide.

I call it a win.