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…