Goodbye, for now

Oh, my good lord. It's been the longest couple of days.

This is what our room looked like yesterday. Mike is sitting at the computer and our amazing stitcher Ana Marie is on her knees cutting out patterns on the floor. Those black boxes behind are the gondolas.

Please note the complete lack of space...

I did dyeing this room. You can see my dye pot straight ahead on the floor, on a portable single burner butted right up next to the dry combustible wooden gondolas... This is the state of my last week of work in NYC.

And this is me sewing the sausage panniers, show girl stuff. One of the girls wears sausages, one wears pretzels and one is a Valkyrie with an enormous beer stein. German humor :)

And speaking of humorous, I witnessed a funny My Fair Lady moment the other day. The Wardobe assistant, Heather, came in looking for their shoes. The costumes for this show came from Britain so all the shoes are in British sizes, which are lower numbers than ours. An American woman's 7 is like a British size 5. So she's hunting through all these shoes trying to compute the British sizes to American and find shoes that will fit her actors with no luck. She needs 8's and 9's and can only find the equivalent of 5's and 6's. She goes to tell Jim and then comes back in the room with a look on her face. I asked her what was going on and she says "Jim says, 'these are all custom made shoes! Can't they just squeeze in??' So now I get to go to rehearsal and ask the actresses which of Cindarella's stepsisters they want to be. Heel or toe??" and she mimes brandishing a knife.

So while I'm laughing Heather starts hunting through her ipod muttering "what kind of music do I need here... ah... Bookends. 'time it was and what a time it was...' indeed..." And then she heaves up the bag of shoes and says "and now I have to plow through NY traffic with this huge bag. And By The Way! Who thought that giving New Yorkers umbrellas was a good idea??" she drops the shoes and puts her hands over her eyes and says "I'm like this all week 'my eyes my eyes!'" And she's so right about that. We've had torrential rain for days and New Yorkers are abrupt and "move over!" enough without umbrellas. Now the sidewalks are like a gauntlet...

So that was yesterday and today was load out, which means that we move all those gondolas onto a truck and then go over to Chelsea and help Ingrid load out all the props and then all that stuff goes to Atlantic City so we can load it in to the theatre there tomorrow. Well, the gondolas are heavy and the sidewalks of NYC are crowded so you can do the math there. Fortunately we had a slew of unemployed actors helping us - all funny and fast moving and willing to work really hard for their $100.

We moved our costume gondolas without issue and then moved the truck to Chelsea and couldn't find a parking space for a semi (no surprise when finding a parking spot for a Vespa means high fives and congratulatory drinks all around). It took 2 hours of the truck circling the block and the driver getting crabbier by the moment before someone moved and we could park the truck.

But even then, our loading ramp is right in the crosswalk, as you can see. And the studio is half way up the block. You haven't lived until you've seen a girl hoist a styrofoam tank - decorated with sequins - onto her shoulder and walk down the block to put it in the truck. And the experience is completely enhanced by the blase looks of the new yorkers around her. I don't think she got many second looks. No matter how weird it gets the new yorkers have seen weirder...

I'm just glad that our ranks of Nazi soldier puppets - for the play within this play - were nicely covered. The idea of explaining the swastikas to the passers by gives me a headache.

Here's Mike hanging out with the prop trash can...

It took 2 more hours to load the props into the truck and then we were on the road for AC. So far we've walked through the theater and I've met more people than I can remember. Tomorrow we load in at 8AM. Yawn...

It's after midnight so I'm out. More later as I have time...