Bright lights, big expletives in my mother’s weekend recap.
By Hannah Wallace
Call it the Noises Off Phenomenon: Stuff going wrong on stage makes for fun stories. I’m sure it’s not fun for my mother, who is, rest assured, effing and blinding in the stage manager’s booth even when things look perfectly calm from the audience’s point of view. She called me up this morning with a Monday Rundown of her own:
“Closed Winter’s Tale Saturday to a disastrous performance. The power went out in the first act, which brings up the emergency lighting—just for a moment, but that means the house lights come up. Then the power came back on, so the house lights went out, but the stage lights went full bore before going back to the right cue. And the projected scenery wasn’t there because the projector had to be turned back on manually. The sail didn’t drop at the end of the first act, not at all—that’s never happened. In the second act, the moonscape didn’t come up because the second projector wasn’t running. Then the lights went out again, so it happened all over again. All this, and Michael [Edwards] had people there, so he wasn’t very happy, so I had to make sure I explained in great detail in my report what every single person does to try to keep these things from happening. It’s too bad, too, because it was a wonderful show, beautiful, and we all enjoyed working on it, and we really wanted to end it with a good performance, and it just…wasn’t.”
I can’t say my weekend went exactly to script, but nothing as bad as all that. Kickball got canceled due to the rain, which I think is the kind of karmic retribution I predicted after all of our home run trash talking. But that just meant CCB and I met Mrs. Harrible at the Sports Page for grilled cheese and French dip sandwiches. And that was so much fun we invited Harmo the Goalie out to do it all over again Saturday night, before going bowling at Sarasota Lanes. A good time was had by all.
Tonight should be interesting: CCB and I are being joined by Big J for our private boxing training session. It was hard enough the first time I trained at Uppercut, and now I’m going to have to deal with my lungs’ residual swine flu tickle. Which sounds like a dance move, but is not as fun as the mashed potato, I assure you.
For now, I’m just trying to wrap up about 17 different assignments in this four-day work week. (Yeah, we’ve got a “mandatory vacation” on Friday, which, regardless of the “mandatory” part, I can’t say I’m disappointed about.) Next Saturday night, what CCB and I had planned as a small gathering at our place to watch the UFC fight is looking like it might draw a bigger crowd than we initially expected. We’d just hoped to have enough people pitch in to cover the Pay-Per-View. Heck, now we might turn a profit.