Tale #44: We Got Trouble

Welcome back! After a brief summer hiatus, it is time for more tales!

In Mid-September, I journeyed back to the Verona Area Community Theater for the first time in over a year for something truly amazing.

The organization that was my theatrical homebase for two thirds of my life chose to name their theater after Mama Terry and myself. They also named the entire building after the original VACT Legend, Dee.

When I found out this past summer that this would be happening, I was floored. I couldn’t believe it.

It felt good.

We’re taught to be humble, we’re taught to do things for the good of mankind, we’re taught to have the right motivations and those are all absolutely the correct lessons. But no person is so morally virtuous that they can deny how amazing it feels to receive recognition like this after years of dedicated service.

Especially when certain elements of that dedicated service were far less than glamorous; some even bordering on grotesque.

We were in the middle of rehearsing our Fall 2016 production of Billy Elliot when my mom found something you never ever want to find in a property you own.

We had trouble my friends. With a Capital T and that rhymes with E and that stands for ewwww mold!

The standard purpose of a pole shed is to store large pieces of farming equipment or large industrial vehicles. They were never designed to house hundreds of performers moving, sweating, snacking, and breathing.

Summers in Wisconsin can get quite humid and the summer of 2016 was an especially sticky one. After rehearsing Mary Poppins and running three summer camps, the building was feeling the strain our organization had put on it.

It decided to retaliate.

The moisture from the sticky summer combined with the non-stop rotation of performers had resulted in white mold developing all throughout the building.

Of course as soon as we found it, we had to cancel all rehearsals in that space until we could get it dealt with.

2016 was a bit of a strange sort-of limbo year if you will. We had broken ground on the new building in June of 2016, so construction was well underway by October. However, we still needed the pole shed for our regular operations until the new building was set to be completed in the summer of 2017.

Luckily, the high school performing arts center director was playing the role of Billy’s Dad in our production, so he let us use the High School PAC for our rehearsals while we dealt with the mold issue.

The board of directors decided that in order to make sure we could really get all of the mold out of the current building (and not accidentally bring mold into our pretty new building), we had to get rid of any furniture, costume pieces, carpeting, props, etc that could not be saved without extensive mold treatment.

On a beautiful fall Sunday in October, a small team of volunteers reported for duty at the VACT Pole Shed Rehearsal building equipped with gloves, goggles, and those sexy respirator masks that make your face look like a giant fly. A large dumpster had been rented and was sitting in the middle of the parking lot.

Our mission: gut the place!

I spent the first couple of hours on my hands and knees with a knife stabbing the carpet and ripping it up. I will admit, there was something almost therapeutic about getting to fully destroy something. With almost primal strength, I stabbed the carpet and ripped it to shreds.

Next, I climbed onto the giant storage shelves to clear out any contaminated small set pieces. The way we were climbing from shelf to shelf definitely wouldn’t have been OSHA approved but we had a lot of pieces stored on high shelves that had to go.

While I was climbing around like a fly/monkey hybrid, another team of volunteers was going through the costume collection while another group went through props and the other group scrubbed the kitchen area cabinets.

The majority of our volunteers were ruthless when it came to getting rid of contaminated objects.

However….

Certain members of the volunteers were sneaking into the dumpster to retrieve items they didn’t want to see go. Their sentimental side was taking control over their practical side.

I had thrown away a broken chair, a moldy jacket, and a stained prop book that all somehow made their way back into the building.

It was infuriating and made you feel like you were going crazy all at the same time.

Eventually, Mama Terry put her foot down and set the volunteers back on the ruthless mission. She created a “nothing comes back out of the dumpster” rule and made sure everyone obeyed it.

A family we were close with had two teenage sons they had brought to help. I had directed both of them in the Spring 2016 production of Bring It On, so they knew me as a professional adult (well semi-professional because I was only twenty-three).

As I maneuvered through the shelves, scratching my legs, smacking my elbows, and dropping f-bomb after f-bomb, I continually reminded the teens that these were special circumstances and after that day they still had to respect me as their director.

Once we were done clearing out the building, the actual mold cleaning company came in and did the official chemical treatment. It was essentially like a bug bomb that got set off to clear out the air and remaining spores.

The building looked really sad after it was all over. Children sat on bare concrete with leftover dried carpet glue as they rehearsed their various shows.

We rehearsed seven more shows in the gutted pole shed before finally moving into our beautiful new rehearsal hall. For those of us regulars who worked every show, we were so relieved when we finally didn’t have to go back to the gross pole shed anymore.

Although for the first two months of working in the new building, I would accidentally drive to the old building on auto-pilot.

So, in summation, yes it feels absolutely amazing that the Terry & Alyssa Dvorak Theater is now a real place where children who will never know the horrors of the mold infested pole-shed can rehearse musicals for years to come.