Skip to main content

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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Or just tell me what you think.

Other things that might interest you...

On aging, and fear.

To begin with, I’m not sure you’re aware of it, but I’m middle aged. Oh? What gave it away? Using a blog as my primary literary medium?¹ Hm. But in fact, the APA defines 35 years as the end of “young adulthood.” Yeah. I found out via some shitpost on twitter when I was already 35, so it didn’t sit well with me then either. But my worries about aging began much sooner than that. See, even in my 20s, I feared I’d been wasting my life. I’d struggled with school and life and everything since graduating high school, arguably sooner, and nothing seemed to be going anywhere meaningful . I felt I had a limited social life, a dead-end job, no money, no great travels, a limping love life; I was, generally, a loser, wasting away... There were none of the usual hallmarks of success or happiness. And that scared me. Would my life have been worth it if I continued in this direction? Would it have been a “life well lived” by the end? So, this is my existential struggle. Even now, as I lurch ever nea...
Post a Comment
Read more

Changing lanes.

I was driving home in some traffic last night when I drifted, in my mind, a long way back (about 20 years) to high school. I was caught in one of those periodic traffic slowdowns as I floated back; you know, those waves of congestion that seem to pass backward through the columns of cars in each lane. (I've heard they start because someone switches lanes, and in response, a rippling emergent slowness travels backward and outward as the cars behind it accommodate the change, one by one.) What drew me back to those younger days was that, back in high school, similar phenomena of congestion took place in the halls between classes, when eddies of young humans would get caught in and around those clumps of those chatting by lockers or retrieving books. Occasionally, backups would occur when groups of people got caught in these eddies, or collided with other groups by the lockers, and slowdowns would ripple back from there. Maybe it's not exactly the same, but as I drove it seemed si...
Post a Comment
Read more

Oatmeal is tasty.

{slurps up berry-oatmeal-deliciousness} Indeed. I need to work on rebuilding a morning schedule. I can be zombie-like enough that I'll waste a perfectly good morning, and have often slept through many. And, really, it's such a useful time of day.
4 comments
Read more