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Oh, Rocky! Or, how my passion brings me pain.

So our monthly shows were this weekend. It was good times. I was kinda zonkered/out of it Friday night, but last night....whoa nelly. I had a blast. It was the kinda show that reminds me why I love doing this month after month.

This weekend, I discovered a fiendish love for running the light board. Friday and Saturday night were only my 2nd and 3rd times doing it, but goddaaaaammn it was fun getting a bit creative with it. (Yeah, I found the blackout buttons. I'm so cool.)

See, I already loved doing lights. More, perhaps, than actually performing. See, part of what I love about Rocky is doing call-lines. I mean, that's how I watch my bad movies for Bad Movie Mondays--heckling, I call that. And really no other job on the cast provides as much opportunity to be loud and proud and dumb and blunt as lights folk. Tech/prop guys have to run back and forth--on and off stage. Performers/shadow actors have to (mostly) stay in character. Lights peeps, on the other hand, stand out in the theater the whole movie. Obviously.

But I also discovered new things to love about the job. One was the light board, as mentioned. The other we'll call simply, "Creative Spotlighting".

See, we have two light trees (hence the board), but we also have two maglights to act as spotlights. Used to be that was all they had--the maglights--but as a lights person who shall remain anonymous once told me, "After we got the trees, we got kinda lazy about spotting people...."


Maglight. Dildotastic.


Makes sense. The trees assumed more than half of what the maglights were originally doing--lighting scenes. Once those trees turn on, the scene is lit, so why spot?

I feel we can still use the spotlights to great--and different!--effect, like creating emphasis and focus on specific shadow actors.



Anyway, back to where I'd originally meant to go with this post.

One problem I had this weekend, as it turns out, is I kinda overexerted myself. I do tend to do that.

Normally it's mostly fine, but this time it's caused me some ouching. My hand, to be exact. The broken one. In all the rushing around and setting shit up and carrying things here and there, I think I put a bit more strain on my hand than was wise.

I know on Friday I was an idiot and clapped my hands during the call-line "Who's got the clap! *clap* Who's got he clap! *clap* Who's got the clap! *clap*". On about the third or fourth clap, I felt the hurty. Hard.

Last night I tried to be more clever about it and limit myself to just carrying a few lighter-ish things and even then mostly with my non-borked hand. I thought that had worked perfectly but this morning's got a bit of an ache. Grrr.

My hand should be healed by next month's shows. Which, by the way, are the third weekend not our usual second weekend. That makes'em April 15th and 16th.
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