It's...all about...tim...ing

I've been working on this play all week. My job is to run a slide show of title cards between each scene, run about a dozen sound cues and run the house lights. I was also tapped to throw a prop on stage. Sounds like a simple plan, huh?

There's an old theatre superstition that states if you have a good final dress rehearsal, that the opening show will be a disaster, and vice versa. We had a good dress rehearsal, so you know how this next part of the story is gonna go.

The first act (out of two) went flawlessly. I was so excited. I made all of the cues I had kinda screwed up on all this week. The actors made all their marks and said all their lines in perfect timing. Coming back from intermission was another matter. The stage lights are set up on a series of sliders so that the lights for the next scene can be set up without screwing up the current scene. While our light tech was setting up the next scene, the stage lights were going nuts. I told her "We're live! We're live!", and she frantically went to correct the lights. That panic attack subsided just in time for me to realize that I had about ten seconds to get out of the booth and down to the stage to throw the prop. I made my cue, even if it was preceded by the sound of me hauling ass.

Now, for the sound cues. The setup they have in the booth had me geeking out. They have this whole DJ setup with sliders, cross faders, mixers and I was geeking out over being able to use them. On the down side, all of my cues were set up on a mini-disc player, which required a new deck independent of the CD mixing deck. I would have to run the cues the old fashioned way, by pressing play and pause. I did, however, have use of the volume slider. The mini-disc player is solid black (in a dark sound booth), and required me to put post-its on the buttons to know which one to push, and the only way to change tracks is by use of a knob.

I screwed up two of the cues opening night. The first was because I pushed play instead of pause, and it kept playing into the next track. I caught it just a split second into the song that was not supposed to play for another five minutes. The second screw-up was because I started the track and accidentally hit the knob, changing it to the next track. Again, I caught it immediately, but not without the mistake being completely obvious.

Several lines got flubbed, some got skipped, but in the end everything turned out fine.

I'm all about accountability, so after the show I gave the director two bucks, saying that for each time I screw up I owe her a dollar. Before Friday's performance, she told me that those two bucks paid for her dinner.

Friday's show went perfectly. No flubbed lines. I only wish the reporter sent to cover the show had come Friday instead of Thursday.