Day 8

Underneath the stage lives a room that the high New Mexico heat never reaches. The dimmer room serves power to all lighting fixtures throughout the theatre, its nine racks (holding 600+ dimmers) feed an array of lighting instruments in every nook and cranny surrounding the stage (and sometimes on it, too).

Today was a day of frustration. I'll get to that, but first…

Today was the first day of on-stage rehearsal! The stage is set for "The Magic Flute", and first thing in the morning comes the "Step Chat", where the big cheese comes out and thanks us all for our hard work now and during the season. It continues with going through the common sense theatre and Opera etiquette which we all know, but is still great reinforcement (Don't be loud, we're rehearsing today, be polite, don't forget about the SIGHTLINE mark on the back deck, smoke in designated places, etc). It was good to hear these things, because it lets me know this company takes itself seriously. Anyone who has worked professional theatre before knows these "rules", but it's always good to hear them again.

Next, we moved and re-arranged for the "family photo", which will be published in the program for the Opera. I'm sure the photographer had great lighting exposure, because the sun was behind us, throwing light onto the dunes and the bright white concrete of the back deck, essentially blinding us. I kept my sunglasses on, not to look cool, but because without them, I couldn't open my eyes. It was bright.

Now it was time to work. Karl (one of my supervisors) gave myself and Jared (another apprentice) the task of running additional video lines from the patch room to the Stage Right wing. No sweat.

Wrong.

We had five spools of cable, and it was recommended that, because the conduit was large enough, to run all five cables at once. This works great, until you pull 80% of the way through the conduit and the cable jams. It jams so hard that your pull-line breaks.

Sigh. Re-run the pull-line.

When you pull cable, you make sure you have enough slack at each main pull-point to make it to the next. If you come across a 90-degree angle in your conduit, you pull a bunch of cable from your source to that 90, then pull it through the 90. The idea being the cable would kink if you tried to pull it past the 90 without any slack.

So we have about 60 feet of video cable, neatly taped every foot or so. We have to undo all the tape. If you have ever played with video cable, you know it doesn't like to be wrangled. Now we have to wrangle five cables to re-feed one at a time. Bummer.

All is not lost! We got the cables run individually in less than an hour, and in reality we only spent about an hour and a half fighting the bundled cable. The remaining time was tracking the conduit, and getting it to the half-way point where we experienced the trouble.

Today was productive, just not as productive as I would have liked. This will get finished tomorrow! Karl also had the idea of adding a video patch bay to the Stage Right wing, which I totally agree with. If you've seen my previous comments, you'll know that this area seems to have the most video activity, and having intelligibility and ease of patching will go a LONG way to faster set-ups and tear-downs. I almost forgot it was quitting time when we finally got all the lines pulled, I was ready to keep going.

We drove home, racing away from the rain-clouds threatening Espanola and Los Alamos. I got to chat with Caitlin for a good while on her drive back from her parents house, and I decided it was time for laundry and grocery shopping. I'm so glad to be near a Trader Joe's, I never seem to waste money on useless food i'll never eat, and most of the food there is GOOD for you.

Example: I like snacks with my lunch, healthier the better. Carrots, yogurt, etc. I found some apple sauce, and checked the ingredients: It had four items in it. No high-fructose corn syrup, no added sugar. 80 calories. 4 cups, $2. C'mon! You can't beat that!

I end up buying a lot at Trader Joe's, but i'm okay with that. I spent $80 on groceries, but it's all food i'm sure to eat (because I like it) and i'm less likely to eat crap fast food, and since I don't have cash, I can't buy food from the Cantina (I hear they only take cash, no credit cards. Inconvenient for some, savior to me)

See you all tomorrow!
-Matt

P.S - While updating to the new version of Safari (on Mac), I started using Firefox. Seems as though the Axton wireless network behaves MUCH better on Firefox than Safari. Let's see if this holds true through the week...