Monday, May 14, 2007

Vic's moonlighting for another team...

This week I will mainly be spending my evenings in a dark, hot, stuffy theatre helping Geiods put on their musical 'Calamity Jane'. Geiods are a musical theatre group, well that's a sort of team. Fortunately for the Wolves, these shows only come around twice a year, once in May, once at Christmas, and fortunately for me too: it's exhausting rigging up a theatre!

I spent most of Sunday lugging heavy lights up and down staircases and playing with lighting desks and walkie-talkies... that is until the batteries died on walkie talkies and we had to resort to shouting.

I was a proper 'techie' armed with electrical tape, string and an adjustable spanner. This piece of kit was essential as I'm such a girl that I couldn't unscrew the light clamps without resorting to using the spanner. They are screwed tight for obvious reasons... they are big and heavy and high up and would certainly give someone a good clonk on the head if they fell.

The lighting desk was particularly exciting to have a go with as no one knew how to drive it. The instruction book ran to about 50 pages and once we did finally manage to save a light setting, we couldn't work out how to make come back on cue. I had never even seen a lighting desk until yesterday and so it was slightly alarming when it kept beeping at us. It was quite fun playing with all the buttons and sliders though. I'm usually only allowed to point spot lights and carry chairs on to the stage!

So I won't be able to join you for the game this week, but I will be thinking of you and I sing along to the show and point my lights.

High Point - eating many sweets and biscuits and finally getting the lighting desk to do something that we wanted it to do.

Low point - having my foot run over by a stage block (it's OK, I survived) and nearly dropping a big light off the balcony.

2 comments:

Manj said...

Hope you have a good time on Wednesday Vic - but no injuries please... I'm hoping Foxy's broken finger will be the only team injury of the season *fingers crossed*

Andy said...

I actually saw a production by that company, a very very long time ago. It was the Gondoliers, and the Duke of Plaza-Toro was the friend of a friend. He forgot the words during his big number.