Tale #37: Stuck in the Highest Heights

One way you can surely earn status in the community theater world is to learn how to do jobs that only a select few know how to do. This makes you extremely valuable and therefore, your presence in the theater carries more weight.

Over the course of my time at VACT, I made it a mission to learn as many jobs as I could. I wanted my position to become invaluable so that I could have influence in the direction of the organization.

However, this resulted in there being times when I was the only person around that knew how to do a certain job. Therefore, I got stuck doing it even when I really really really didn’t want to.

Flash back to Tale #12 when I dropped the screw off of the weight deck. Well, Lighting Guy Steve trusted me enough to finish teaching me how to reweight and I was approved to do it on my own.

In the summer of 2016, VACT did a massive production of Disney and Cameron Mackintosh’s Mary Poppins. The director was a regular face in the director pool who was known for wanting larger than life sets complete with a full set of theatrical backdrops. I can’t judge there, for I too have been scolded for my gargantuan set concepts.

This show also featured flying. Flying in a show requires four pipes at a minimum for the rigging (don’t quote me on that I’m not 100% sure). Then we had multiple backdrops and we used the cyc (short for cyclorama screen) and the olio (see Tale #3). We also had signs that flew in which required their own pipes and the regular usage of pipes for lighting.

Long story short: we used a lot of pipes. That required a lot of reweighting.

Moving a show into the theater is exciting. The anticipation of opening night applause motivates everyone to put everything together in the best way possible to create true theater magic.

Moving a show out of a theater…well…sorry if any little kids are reading this…it’s a bitch. You are tired from the final cast party, you have no incentive other than to be done and go home, and far fewer volunteers come to help. This show was a special monster to strike.

The few people who knew how to reweight the pipes at this strike were myself, my friend Alex who had designed the set, Lighting Guy Steve, and Sound Guy Dale. Well, given the enormity of the set and tech requirements for this show, they were all incredibly busy handling other aspects of strike. The producer and the set designer/construction manager would usually leave with the set pieces on the trailers to oversee the return to the rehearsal building. Dale and Steve would usually stay at the high school to finish the technical elements and do final spot checks. So that left me for reweighting.

When it came time to do the reweighting, Steve sent me up the many many stairs to get started on the weight deck. Reweighting is a process that just physically cannot go quickly. It takes a lot of time. You go go go on the first pipe then stop and wait for a long time until they are ready for the second pipe. Then go go go again. Over and over until it is done. I yelled “Clear the Blue” more times than I could keep track of.

In between when they actively needed me, I had a choice. I could come down stairs or stay and sit on the weight deck. Given the number of stairs, I chose to sit and wait.

I texted Mama Terry (the Producer on this giant) to see how their part of strike was going. I played Candy Crush. I took a nap.

I spent almost two hours on the weight deck at this strike. I was up there for so long that people forgot where I was. I started to develop altitude sickness I was up there for so long.

By the time I returned to the stage after the final pipe had been reweighted, everyone was pretty much gone and everything was pretty much done. My hands were the color of cheetos after handling all of those old, rusty, and gross weight plates.

I scrubbed my hands, grabbed my stuff, and got ready to head out.

Our usual crew of VACT die-hards headed to a local restaurant for some desperately needed lunch and alcohol. We later found out that our Director (whose massive set we had spent hours striking) had hosted a pool party and forgotten to invite us.

So that was nice.