Monthly Archives: November 2007

Just can’t wait to get on the road again

Behind the scenes

Jeremy reminded me yesterday of this gloriously awful production of the Nutcracker that we worked on together, back in the day. His post brought back a flood of memories. My friend Ray ran the theatre at my college, and he knew a guy who needed a stage manager. I didn’t have much going on that month, so I signed on board. This was a touring show, mind you, so we spent a lot of time in a rented fifteen-foot box truck from Budget, either stuck in traffic or trying not to flip over on the interchange from 290 to 495 North.

The organizers had a good thing going. They ran a dance school in Cambridge, and they taught dance classes to little kids all over Massachusetts. The high-school kids got the lead roles, and the director played Drosselmeyer. But the little kids from the various regional classes did not tour. There was a different crop of between fifty and eighty kids (representing party children, mice, toy soldiers, snowflakes, sheep, angels, and Polichinelles) appearing in the show at every destination, which meant that there was a fresh group of parents shelling out buckets of cash every weekend: $15 audition fee, $35 “production fee,” and then of course the entire family was expected to buy tickets to the performance itself.

The kids were great. They were incredibly enthusiastic. When I went down to their dressing room to call, “ten minutes, please,” they would roar back, “THANK YOU, TEN MINUTES!” The lead dancers, in contrast, routinely failed to acknowledge my presence at all. Suit yourselves; show starts with or without you.

My favorite moment was when we were loading in to the auditorium at Wachusett Regional High School. We opened the loading dock door and discovered that the wings were filled with folded-up choral risers, plus an acoustical shell. The wing space was pretty limited to begin with, and these risers took up the entire space. We couldn’t even unload the truck with them there.

We were on a tight schedule; we had to put the marley down before we could even start on the lights. So I had my crew start wheeling these risers out into the hallway by the cafeteria.

Immediately, a little man fussed out of the orchestra rehearsal room, demanding to know what we thought we were doing. I explained that we had rented the auditorium, and needed to, you know, actually use it. We would be very careful with his precious risers and put them back where we found them at the end of load-out.

He said, “No! You don’t understand. It’s almost lunch time—the kids will throw food at the risers!”

I just gaped. Jeremy stepped in, and said, “I think what Dave is trying to say is, what the hell kind of place are you running here? Who’s in charge, the students or the teachers?” I honestly couldn’t believe my ears. If we had tried throwing food when I was in high school, there would have been hell to pay.

In spite of the apparent buckets of money coming into the box office, the show was pretty low-budget. This included the company manager’s tendency to take his time about paying me and my crew. I provided detailed time cards, and he grudgingly wrote checks. But when we finished the last show, they still owed us close to eight hundred dollars, and as the weeks turned into months, it became fairly obvious that they had no intention of paying us at all.

After the holiday season was over, they put on a spring production; I forget what it was. They found some other sucker to stage-manage. And they booked the theatre at my college, which, you may recall, was run by my friend Ray.

So they showed up bright and early with their beat-up Budget truck, and loaded everything onto the dock. The truck was blocking the alley, so Ray asked them to move it before they started to unpack and lay out the marley. They were on a tight schedule, as usual, but they agreed.

When they returned from the parking lot, they discovered that the theatre was locked up tight, with all of their gear inside. Ray was sitting on the front steps, looking pensive. When the director asked him to let them in, Ray drew on his cigarette, puffed out the smoke, and drawled, “I understand you owe my friend Dave some money.”

4, 3, 2, 1

Nate

Scene: the bathroom. Nate is ready to wash his hands, but he is not quite strong enough to turn on the faucet. Opa, Nate’s paternal grandfather, is supervising.

Nate: You have five seconds to turn the water on for me.

Dad (offstage): Nate, you may not speak to Opa that way. Please apologize, and ask him nicely.

Nate: Opa, will you please have five seconds to turn the water on for me?

Wake up

Sarah

Now what?

So today is the 232nd birthday of the United States Marine Corps. It is also the 32nd anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. And yes, it would have been my sixth wedding anniversary.

Let me tell you what’s happening in this picture.

Sarah’s godmother, Anne Louise, performed the second reading, from 1 Corinthians: “The greatest of these is love.” While she was reading, Father Murphy sat down in a chair in an alcove next to the altar. He bowed his head and closed his eyes. Was he praying?

Anne Louise finished the reading. She stepped down from the dais and took her seat.

There was silence. Father Murphy didn’t move.

In the picture, Sarah is looking at me and whispering through her smile, “Honey? Ut the hell do we do now?”

I was trying hard not to laugh. Without moving my lips, I murmured, “I think it’s the best man’s responsibility to wake up the priest.”

Luckily, the organist was on the ball. He played a little filler music, maybe goosed the volume just a little on the coda, and Father Murphy woke up and continued with the ceremony.

I’ll never know if he was really asleep, or just deep in meditation. But this picture always makes me smile.

What’s in a name?

Behind the scenes, Nate, Sarah

Thanks to everyone who expressed their sympathy over the loss of Sarah’s jewelry. I think I am basically over it. It’s not as if I had intended to wear it, after all, and I still have the memories. I cancelled the maid service and changed the locks, and I (tearfully) gave the charm bracelets to Sarah’s nieces. I still have the first piece of jewelry I gave Sarah, a silver Tiffany bracelet with our initials engraved on opposite sides of a silver heart. That will have to do.

In the comments of the last post, Peg raised the question of how my blog got its name. It’s not quite as simple as she guessed.

Sarah’s totem animal was the manatee. She loved homely animals, and the manatee topped the list. She had manatee jewelry, manatee socks, manatee mugs, just all kinds of manatee paraphernalia. This made it easy for me to pick out gifts for her. A manatee trinket was shorthand for “I love you.”

When we met, I didn’t have a similar obsession. This made it a bit more of a challenge for Sarah to pick out gifts for me.

One day, when we were packing for our first overnight trip together, Sarah presented me with what she called a “travel animal.” She explained that one of her ex-boyfriends had been in the military, and he introduced her to the concept. Apparently it’s traditional for an infantryman to carry a small plush animal in his backpack, to be his “eyes behind” and help look out for danger. He shared the tradition with her, and now she was continuing it with me.

My new travel animal was a Beanie Baby: Happy the Hippo. I was completely delighted. Happy has accompanied me on every trip I’ve ever taken since then. He’s been all over the world. As time passed, however, we realized that this gift was much more than it seemed. It had revealed my totem animal to me. Any time I saw a picture of a hippopotamus, it reminded me of Sarah and how much she loved me. Soon the hippo-themed gifts began in earnest. We even made a pilgrimage to Busch Gardens in Tampa Bay, where we took the Animal Adventure Tour specifically so we could go backstage and feed the hippos. (Of course, we also visited the Lowry Park Zoo and hung out with the manatees for several hours.)

The suffix -potamus entered our vocabulary fairly quickly, but it really took off when Nate was born. When he was hungry, he was a hungrypotamus. When he was sleepy, he was a sleepypotamus. When he was spitting up, he was a messypotamus (from Messypotamia, of course). And when he was cranky? Obviously, he was a crankopotamus. And when he woke us up in the middle of the night, we were all crankopotamuses together.

Nate inherited the (dozens of) plush manatees, but they’re not his thing. I await with interest the revelation of his totem animal. At the moment he loves penguins and turtles, but it’s still too early to say.

As for me, I still love hippos, but my collection has slowed way down since Sarah died. We saw a great wooden hippo puzzle while on vacation this summer, but in the end I just couldn’t bear to buy it.

I miss my wife.