Tale #8: They can’t all be like this!

Sometimes in life you have moments when you feel really, really dumb. I have many. 

I wore multiple hats during my time at VACT, but one hat that I was strangely very fond of was program designer. I did the graphic design for all seven show programs in a season. These were our “Playbills” if you will (although I don’t actually think I can call ours a Playbill because I’m pretty sure the name Playbill is heavily copyrighted by top Broadway big shots.)

Anyways, the programs typically ran about 24 – 28 pages long. Page length depended on the size of the cast, the size of the crew, the type of production, how many ads we had sold, etc. Musicals always had bigger programs than plays. Youth shows always had bigger programs than adults shows because we did a joint program to cover 2-3 youth shows.

The biggest program I had ever assembled was a whopping 32 pages. It was the joint program for our 2018 spring youth series that included A Race to the Finish (Grades K-1), Disney’s The Jungle Book KIDS (Grades 2-4), and Bye, Bye Birdie YPE (Grades 5-8). Not only was this the longest program I had assembled, it was also the largest print order I had ever placed.

The three shows had a combined cast size of over 300 kids. That resulted in a lot of tickets sold and therefore, a lot of programs needed.

We ordered 4000 programs. I think that is still the record for most programs ever ordered.

The programs are printed by a local printing company in Verona. I would often pick up the program boxes myself on the way to the theater partly because I didn’t want anyone older in our group throwing their backs out loading all of the boxes and partly because their location was right across the street from our local McDonalds. So, I would get my iced coffee, pick up the programs, and head to the theater.

One fateful afternoon, I got my coffee like normal and drove across to the printers to pick up my 4000 programs. I usually would pick them up at the front door but due to the large size of the order, I had to go to the loading dock to get all the boxes. An employee helped me load the numerous boxes into my car and then wished me a great rest of my day.

Whenever I picked up the programs for a show, I always swiped two from one of the boxes. I kept one for my own personal collection and one for our “memory binders” at VACT. During the process of moving to our new building in 2017, I took all of the newspaper clippings, posters, programs, award certificates, etc that I could salvage from the office and put them into clear binder slips and created a series of binders dedicated to the printed memories of our theater. The binders take it all the way back to the first show in 1992.

I opened the box and was faced with something quite odd.

Now when you do program design, you end up reading the thing about a thousand times. You have to proof all of the names, make sure all the ads are present and printing in a good resolution, make sure the dates are correct, etc. You basically read it so much that you begin to hate the show and hate your life.

Therefore, I was quite alarmed when the title page I had proofed a thousand times was not there.

I frantically grabbed the program and flipped through it. All of my beautifully designed pages were in the wrong order. I grabbed another and another to find the same thing.

Now, rather than intelligently realizing that there was a mistake in the printing process and calmly going in to speak with someone, my brain made a different choice.

In that moment my idiotic brain went, “they can’t all be like this!”

I proceeded to open multiple boxes to find the same thing. It took me way too long to realize that yes, they were all like that. As I said before, sometimes you just have really dumb moments.

It was the end of the work day when I had stopped by, so I had a very hard time finding an employee to help me get all of the boxes back out of my car.

I wandered through the loading dock calling out for anyone to come and help me. A nice older gentleman appeared (a different guy than the one who had helped me load them all up).

I explained what had happened and that I needed emergency reprints and I needed all of the boxes out of my car and I needed it all to be fixed right away. Yes, I was talking just as frantically as this writing sounds.

He very nicely, but very… slowly…, got a pallet jack out so we could get all the boxes out of my car.

By this point, I was probably about fifteen minutes late for dress rehearsal, but whatever. There were other adults with the kids and the lighting guys had unlocked that day so nobody missed me.

To their credit, the printers kicked ass in getting those reprints done. They were understandably equally as frustrated since this was a 4000-program order that they now had to reprint, as a rush job, for free, because it was their mistake and not mine.

The correctly printed programs got picked up at 5:00pm on Thursday, April 12^th for our 6:00pm performance of A Race to the Finish. 

Whenever you see someone having a dumb moment, it is important to realize that they are probably not dumb people. They may be stressed, or panicked, or frustrated, or overwhelmed. They may even have just realized that their 4000-program order was f***ed up and needed reprinting.