2 WTF moments & 1 War Eagle moment

Today I had 2 WTF moments:

First, as I was driving in to the theatre tonight for the show, I passed the front doors and saw our house manager outside talking to ... a cop? I pull around the side of the building to park and see that yes, there is a cop car parked beside the building. By the time I had parked and gotten my stuff, the cop had already gotten back in the car and was pulling out, so I high-tailed it inside. No house manager in sight, but our ME is in his office. I asked him why the cop was here and he says "Uh, I think he wanted to buy a ticket, actually." My heart was beating so fast, I thought I was going to go into cardiac arrest.

Then, I found 3 pencils, a pen, a cough drop (unwrapped, but uneaten) and a penny scattered around the apron of the stage. It was like a middle schooler emptied their pockets on the stage. It wasn't there last night, and nobody should've been in the theatre today... It's a mystery.

And I had a total War Eagle Moment this afternoon! My boss and our props designer both had errands to run this afternoon, so I had to meet the head of the theatre department at Christian Brothers University (this tiny little Christian college about 3 blocks away from POTS) to give him a Tele-cue that he was renting from us, show him how it worked, and get him to sign the rental form. Well, I was wearing my Auburn Theatre hoodie, and he War Eagle'd me- he graduated from Auburn with a Theatre degree in... '91, I think he said? His sophomore year was the year they hired Dan! Lynn & Robin were both there when he was, too. His class was the first one to do a haunted house. He also said that he came back a few years ago to visit and (ew ew ew) the green room furniture is the same.

Strangest Patron Ever

So last night, I had the strangest interaction with a patron I think I've ever had- ranked right up there with the guy who didn't seem to understand why I didn't want his 6-year-old daughter to go down the fireman's pole on the set of Alice in Wonderland...

I walk into the theatre at 6:15, a little earlier than usual. The doors were unlocked because of rehearsal in the big banquet room (normally we keep the exterior doors locked for as long as possible due to homeless people). So I walk in and there's this guy standing in the lobby, right inside the door. I gave him the quick Memphis once-over (are you dressed like a hobo? can I smell you from where I'm standing?) and then saw that he was holding a comp ticket voucher, so he was obviously in the right place, just really early.

Man: Is this Black Pearl Sings? Is that here?

Me: Yes sir. There's nobody here from the box office yet, but feel free to wait in the lobby until they open.

Man: Where do I wait?

Me: Right here, in the lobby. There are some benches here, or feel free to look at the art in the gallery through those doors.

Man: I can't go in there yet, though? (ie, into the house)

Me: No, not yet. You need to wait in the lobby.

Man: OK, thanks. What's your name?

Me: Becky.

Man: OK, thanks Becky.

Me: No problem, sir. Enjoy the show.

I went upstairs to the booth. This took me about 30 seconds. When I got to the booth I glanced out the window, and saw the man sitting on the chaise onstage. I leaned out the window and yelled "SIR! GET OFF THE STAGE PLEASE!" And he looked up all startled and saw me, and walked back out to the lobby.

At this point, I'm a little bit freaked out, so while I was eating my dinner in the green room I turned on the monitor for the stage, so I would be able to see if he decided to take another nappy-nap on the set. He didn't come back in, and I thought I'd seen the last of him...

Then, at 7:00, I was standing onstage with one of the actresses, just chatting about the little kids in the audience at the morning matinee, and he opens the doors from the lobby and walks into the house!

Me: Sir, you need to wait in the lobby, please.

Man: Becky!

Me: Please wait in the lobby until we open the doors.

Man: Oh, I thought I heard them say the show was about to start.

Me: No, sir, we've got an hour before the show starts. You need to wait in the lobby.

Man: What time does the show start?

Me: 8:00.

Man: What time is it now, like 7:30?

Me: No sir, it's 7:00. There's an hour before the show starts.

Man: Well what am I supposed to do until then?

Me: Uhhhhh

Actress: You could. Uh. Go get some dinner. Or something?

Man: I already did that!

Me: Well, sir, I'm sorry, but you're just early. The show doesn't start for an hour...

Just then our house manager opened the door and got him to go back into the lobby.

I'm not entirely sure if he had something wrong with him or what, but it was absolutely bizarre.

Tape.

Today I taped out 2 sets- first, I helped our mainstage ASM tape out the Darling Nursery for Peter Pan in our main rehearsal room, then I ventured alone to the wilds of the 5th floor to attempt to tape out the set of A Christmas Story.

I was excited to tape out the Peter Pan set because it meant I could use my nifty little drafting of the rehearsal room that I made for the first time! I was without a task for a little while one day at work, and decided to get a transparency and draft our main rehearsal room onto it in 1/4" scale, so that we can lay it down on a groundplan and know exactly how much of the set will fit in the room and also where that damn pole will end up before we start taping it out and realize that it's smack in the middle of something important, which is what seemed to always happen. Anyway, I did that, and this is the first time we've used it. It was actually pretty helpful, we smooshed some stuff around to make the pole land in the middle of the bunkbed where it would be out of the way.

And then I went upstairs. To the 5th floor. Let me explain about the 5th floor- it is empty. It is a desolate wasteland of empty office space, not even used for storage. Mostly it's just empty- a few of the rooms have scary things in them, like the kitchen with the breaker panel facing on the floor, and the bathroom with no ceiling tiles because the roof leaks- but it's primarily a maze of empty offices. Well, A Christmas Story is rehearsing in this empty maze due to an utter lack of space elsewhere on POTS property, and while it is not an ideal rehearsal space (none of the rooms are really big enough to get the whole set taped out) it's actually starting to grow on me. I've spent the last few days vacuuming, changing light bulbs (which caused a breaker to blow and all of the lights to cease working for a few hours) and Clorox-wiping every surface I can imagine these children touching in preparation for rehearsals to begin upstairs. I've also put up signs with arrows leading from the elevator to the rehearsal room and from the rehearsal room to the bathrooms, and signs that say Homework Area, Props Go Here, etc. I'm enjoying the fact that this space is 100% ours- we won't have to share it with anyone, and while it is not ideal, it's not half bad, either.

My real adventure today was taping the set out... I fit the house in the bigger of our 2 rooms, and the school and Christmas tree lot are going in the smaller room next door tomorrow. I was taping by myself, which is always an adventure, doing the whole "pull a few feet of tape and then step on the end and stretch" thing. The biggest challenge is the fact that this room has brown shag carpeting covering every inch of the floor. I'm not sure yet how well the tape is going to hold up on the carpet, but I do know that none of my lines are straight- pushing the tape down makes the carpet move underneath it, which makes the lines all wiggly.

I think that taping on shag carpet might actually be worse than taping out The Producers this summer when we ran out of colors of spike tape and had to make more by coloring dots and stripes with Sharpies. At least then the lines were straight...

Anyway, the moral of my story today is this: USE SCISSORS. Or a box cutter. Or a knife. Or a sharp stick. Something other than your fingers to tear copious amounts of spike tape, cause my fingernails are jacked up, y'all.

Lazy playwrights

We opened Black Pearl Sings! last night! It was a great opening performance, the audience loved it and the 2 actresses in the show had maybe the best run we've had so far.

The story of the play is great, but I just really have a bone to pick with the playwright. There are so many historical inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the script it's just ridiculous. None of them are so major that they couldn't be fixed with a little tweaking, but they're also big enough that anyone who does even a tiny bit of googling will notice them immediately. The fact that they're there in the first place is really just appalling- he either did no research into the historical accuracy of what he was writing about, or he chose to completely disregard it. I need a little time to rant...

-The biggest inaccuracy is the fact that the play is set in 1933 and Susannah states multiple times that she wants to be the first female professor at Harvard. The first female professor at Harvard was Alice Hamilton, an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Medicine and a pioneer of workplace safety regulations who was hired in 1919.

-Another thing that bothers me is the terrible dialect that Pearl's lines are written in. She is from Hilton Head, and a part of the Gullah people. The Gullah dialect is extremely distinctive, and Pearl's lines are written phonetically in what I can only describe as some sort of generic, inconsistent, stereotypical poor grammar that bears no similarity whatsoever to the Gullah dialect. What bothers me the most, I think, is the inconsistency- she doesn't always use the singular instead of the plural. She doesn't always use incorrect verb tenses. She doesn't always drop the possessive. Just sometimes.

-Another historical inaccuracy- Pearl says "Those historical ladies last night say they got a motto- 'Well behaved women never make history.' " That phrase was coined by a woman named Laurel Thatcher Ulrich at some point in the 1970s.

-Another lovely inaccuracy- they mention in the play multiple times that the house across the street is "the narrowest house in New York" and "the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay lives there." Edna St. Vincent Millay really did live in the narrowest house in New York... for one year. 1923. A decade before the play takes place.

-Another brilliant lack of historical research on the playwright's part is the fact that in the summer of 1933, the governor of Texas (referred to in the play multiple times in the masculine, but never by name) was a woman named Ma Ferguson.

Plus the fact that he made the daughter's name Uniqua just irks me. It's drawn a laugh from the preview audience & the opening audience, and it's not supposed to be funny...