Tale #27: Zip Tying a Chain Link Fence

Midnight Move-In Noun
What occurs when the High School Performing Arts Center won’t let you move-in on Saturday morning like you always do, so you decide to move your show into the theater at 11pm after the group that rented the theater on the Saturday night gets their crap out.
For West Side Story, VACT needed to do a Midnight Move-In.

West Side Story was the second teen show I ever directed with VACT. It was performed in the Spring of 2017. We had an insanely large cast, an insanely large set, and an insanely large amount of costumes. We rehearsed the show at our old pole-shed rehearsal building. It was the second to last show ever rehearsed in that space before we moved into our new rehearsal building.

Our set design was meant to represent a block of New York City. We had two stoops, a high balcony over Doc’s Drugstore, and a large metal balcony with a staircase for the classic balcony scene.

Funnily enough, my Uncle Charlie took the large metal balcony piece after the show ended and is using it as a hunting stand in Northern Wisconsin.

For The Rumble, I wanted to have a row of chain link fence pieces fly in downstage so that the audience would watch all of the fight choreography from the other side of the fence.

A fencing company in Madison very generously donated the pieces for use in our production. My cousin, Charlie Jr., drove down one afternoon with his trailer so we could go to the warehouse lot and pick up the individual fence pieces. There were five individual fences that would need to be attached and hung in the theater.

Now typically, our shows would move into the High School Performing Arts Center the Saturday morning before our opening night. For our teen shows, this meant we had all day Saturday and Sunday to set up and then could do a full rehearsal on Sunday night in the theater. With West Side Story, we had arranged for the pit orchestra to come to the Sunday night rehearsal. If you know anything about West Side Story, you know the orchestrations, while amazing, are a b****. So we really needed that rehearsal with the cast and the pit.

Therefore, I suggested that we move in late Saturday night after the Country Music Review currently holding up the Performing Arts Center moved their show out.

Midnight Move-In was born.

Turns out, teenagers are way more willing to help late at night when they are already awake versus early in the morning when they are sound asleep. We got coolers of sodas and waters and multiple bags of chips and candy to keep everyone energized (and awake) to move our massive production into the theater overnight.

It took two large gooseneck trailers and multiple mini-vans and trucks to move the sets, costumes, pianos, lobby decorations, microphones, and sound equipment to the theater. My cousin Charlie Jr. and my cousin Pam’s husband (cousin-in-law?) Scott were my heros in flannel for driving those massive trailers so late at night.

Once we finally got everything loaded into the theater, we got to work putting it all together.

If you have been tuning into the blog each week, you should remember Tale #9 where we learned you never duck under pipes. You should also remember Tale #12 where we learned about re-weighting drops.

My blog is really educational, I know.

Circling back to the Chain Link Fence: they needed to be flow in and out on a pipe. So, remember your previous tales, we had to hang them on the pipe.

We laid all five fence pieces flat on the stage and lined them up right next to each other. We used strong zip ties to keep the fence pieces together so we could fly them as one unit.

I gave handfuls of zip ties to a group of teens and said, “please zip tie all of the fence pieces together”. I didn’t feel much more instruction was needed. It was a fairly simple task.

It was about 1:45am at this point though.

I went off to answer some questions about the placement of the stoop stairs and then came back about 10 minutes later to check on the zip tying teens. I looked and saw the young man playing Action standing at the edge of the last fence piece holding a bunch of zip ties in his hands. He was just staring at the edge of the fence.

I slowly approached him and said, “Hey buddy. Whatcha doing?”

He looked at me and said, “what am I supposed to zip tie it to?”

I determined at that moment that it was probably time for the teens to go home.

I calmly explained that if he had reached the edge of the final fence piece, that meant they were done. There was nothing else to zip tie together.

We wrapped up at about 2:30am and went home to sleep. I slept about 6 hours before I had to get back up and get back to the theater to keep working.

I was also dog sitting for Mama Terry that weekend and her dog was having a massive eye pressure problem. But that’s a story for another day.