Day 5

The "Basement", under the back deck. The scenery for each show is stored here, in it's own "cut". The "cuts" are the spaces between the cement support pillars. "Takes of Hoffman" is in the nearest cut, followed by "Magic Flute", then "Madame Butterfly". The "B" lift is off-camera right, which goes from the basement to the stage level.

Today is Safety Day! The morning was filled with in-depth lectures on basic safety (common sense), fire training, ladder and scaffold training, chemical exposure, hantavirus exposure training (lots of rodents in the area) and posture/back presentations. Lots of good info, and mandatory for all Opera members (those who are returning from last year only have to attend every other year). A/V documented the Safety Day for future employees who may join after today. One of the fun parts of the morning was going out to the Orchestra parking lot and putting out fires with various fire extinguishers.

Lunch came next, and i've started to join the rest of the company down at the Cantina. It's an OSHA recommendation (or requirement?) that you take lunch AWAY from your work area, so you don't contaminate your food with work chemicals/materials, but I think it's also for your own sanity. I've brought my lunch every day except Monday (which was at the Tesuque Village Market) and i've eaten dinner at home every night except for tonight (keep reading).

After lunch, we continued to tackle the wiring issues from Wednesday. I came back to the Stage Right wing, cleaning up the logistics of the video wiring. About an hour or so all was buttoned up, set up for much expansion in the future. Just before it was time to go home, we discovered that the Stage Manager's VariCam feed wasn't going to the control room.

We have several remote control and static cameras here at the Opera. Two front-of-house cameras sit on the front edge of the balcony to give backstage folks a broad view of the stage. One of those cameras feeds to the control room (with a remote control for pan/tilt, zoom and focus) and another duplicate camera goes to the Stage Manager in the Stage Right wing (which also has it's own remote control). Previously, the stage manager and control room each had a remote control and shared a camera, but a second camera was added so the stage manager could zoom in and pan around without disrupting the other feed. Since the camera feed was run directly to the stage manager's desk, there was no feed to the control room. A few video amplifiers and some spare video lines resolved that, however there are no more free spare video lines running to the Stage Right wing, which sounds like a project for next week.

After heading home, one of my roommates (Juan, on the stage crew*) invited me out to Chopstix, a take-out chinese food place. A few other stage crew people tagged along, but we ended up going to a Baja-style place anyway, sitting outside watching the sun set. I had my first fish taco ever. It was okay, kinda anti-climactic. It was great to sit outside and bond a bit with the people i'd be living with for the next three months. Five days ago I doubt I would have been this social, but i'm realizing that I can't sit in my apartment all day for three months without ending up miserable.

Good night everyone! The other half of Safety Day is tomorrow!
-Matt