Science Friday

Sandbag day again.

I don’t know if it was the sleep I got last night (bad insomnia this week…) or the preemptive Aleve or my fortifying breakfast bagel but I woke up with mad sandbag skillz today. My staples were straight and close and tight and after the 4^th bag, Bianca looks up from the sewing machine and says “wow, I haven’t had to redo a single one yet!” So apparently I can safely add “sandbag skills” to my resume…

However, we also did shot bags, which are smaller bags filled with lead shot. So I’m filling bags with lead shot – looks like little BBs and has a tendency to run all over the place – and we’re listening to NPRs Science Friday segment. They are talking about radioactive fungus and some hemorrhagic septicemia epidemic in fish that’s sweeping the nation and as I dig my bare hands into the shot bag I’m starting to think about lead. Toxic, right? Absorbed through the skin, right? I wonder if it’s treated with some protective covering, I think to myself… Surely if it were toxic they would have told me to wear gloves, right? I finish the bags and take them to the table and Gina, my boss, looks at my black lead covered hands and says “Go scrub your hands off, immediately!” Ok, so no protective covering. What are the signs of lead poisoning again?

But other than the possible toxicity, it was a great morning. Here are the people who amused me today:

Joe – Joe and Gina are a married couple who run Sonora Theatre Works (or, as I called it all day, “Chernobyl”). Joe builds scenery and Gina deals with fabric stuff (called “soft goods”) and their shops are connected. So Joe wanders in this morning, looks around the room, checks the bathroom and then comes over to me and says quietly, “Kaitlyn, can you come help me with something?” Uh, sure. So I go into his shop and help him lift and rotate this foam covering – not heavy, just needed two people – and go back into our shop and continue working on sandbags. 5 minutes later Joe comes back in and looks around and Bianca sees him and smiles and says “all clear!” so Joe says “Kaitlyn??” And I go help him lift and rotate another foam covering. But this time I come back to the shop and ask Bianca “Am I supposed to be helping him?” Bianca says “Well, as long as Gina isn’t here, it’s ok.” Apparently Gina doesn’t like sharing her employees and gets angry at Joe when he asks them for help. But she can use his employees. Weird…

Wyatt – one of the colorful stagehand characters that populate Tucson. Wyatt looks exactly like I imagine Gandalf looked at about 25-years-old. Same eyes, hair and beard (only blond instead of white) and looks like he knows his way around a role playing game. My other favorite stagehand is Andy who is in his mid 40s with an Ichabod Crane type of build and this fuzzy white blond hair like a baby chick. Only his hairline is receding in front and has a big bald spot on top and he shaves it into this moth-eaten mohawk and dyes it blue. How can you not love that?

Bianca – somehow she contracted my sandbag disease of last week. Midway through the morning she called herself Amelia Bedelia after stitching a seam wrong twice. Years it’s been since I’ve heard those two words? About 28.

So next week I get a break from the Locust Theatre, which is good since I start my new round of classes, and then I’ll probably be back the week after to help them sew curtains for a trailer park. For real.

Theatre = Fun!

Have a good weekend everyone!

Beep Beep!

So I’m still working at the Locust Theatre (otherwise known in every other circle as Sonora Theatre Works) and had the joy of making sandbags today. And yes, they are exactly what they sound like, bags of sand with handles on them. 25lb bags of sand with handles, to be precise.

In film production they use the sandbags to weigh down tripod legs holding lights, cameras, screens etc. to give them more stability. So they have to be durable and portable.

But here’s the thing: each side of the bag holds 12.5lb of sand, which doesn’t sound like much until you consider that we’re making 25 sandbags which means 50 bags of sand weighing 12.5lb that have to be poured, weighed, sealed and then stitched into a fabric covering (and moved from one location to another after each step of that process). That’s a lot of sand…And my arms hurt. I had no idea what to expect, but I should have expected the pain when Bianca announced that she woke up this morning and took a “preemptive Aleve” because she remembered it was sandbag day.

But one of the fun things about this job is learning unconventional sewing techniques because the stuff we sew doesn’t hold together well by conventional methods. So we use pins but we also use staples and clothespins and binder clips to hold things together until they are stitched.

Today it was staples. So I’m stapling together these fabric bags with plastic bags of sand inside them and then hauling them from one side of the table to the other by the sewing machine (did I mention my arms hurt? My shoulders hurt too…). And my staple gun was jamming and the staples weren’t straight enough or close enough, or went through the bag of sand or were otherwise just wrong and bad and inadequate. So all morning Bianca had to take them out and redo them before she could sew them.

Finally, 2 hours in she looks at me in compassion and says “It’s ok, you’re good at other things…”

And while I’m laughing she says “besides you were brilliant yesterday, so you get a day off after that.”

Yesterday she gave me the “Wile E. Coyote Award” for “brilliance of invention under pressure,” which is quite possibly my favorite thing ever. And all I did was show her a different way to do something that saved a lot of time and aggravation.

But today, ouch…