Pennsyl-tucky

Left Hershey in a blaze of glory by loading out about an hour faster than we had loaded out in Delaware. And it was our first night on the bus, so woo hoo! The bus the bus. I'll get to that later.

It requires pictures.

So we drive overnight and sleep in our bunks and I wake up to my TD – Pizzi – in my face saying “Kaitlyn wake up! You're 20 minutes late to your call...”

Lovely start.

Got up, dressed and wandered out to find the theatre and the wardrobe room. Load in was delayed because we had absolutely no space on deck. Our gondolas would have to live in the hallway but they couldn't be there right now because everything else was in the hallway. So wigs and wardrobe lived in one room for most of the day...

And then there was laundry. You know, I've always said that if I had the money I would hire a chauffeur and a maid. I'm adding laundry to my future maid's list of responsibilities because I'm getting to the point where I don't want to even hear the word again.

We had one washing machine and one dryer and they were practically on the loading dock, behind all this electrical madness.

And the dryer was old and tired and didn't really want to work so well... And we had about 5 loads to do. AND we couldn't get started until the afternoon because it was all on the third truck that hadn't been unloaded. So yay.

Mid afternoon I decide to take a shower. When we're traveling on the bus for one nighters we don't get hotel rooms so we have to shower at the theatre...somehow...somewhere...at some point in our day. I get a free minute and go upstairs, turn on the water to let it get hot, lay all my stuff out, get in the shower and the whole shower head decides to bust loose. The inside of the shower head flies across the shower and out through the flimsy inadequate curtain. But the water doesn't cut off, which leaves a powerful rushing stream of water flying straight at me and also out of the shower stall onto the floor and my stuff. So I'm trying to find the shower head, fight the water stream, put the shower head back on (it flies right off again) and move my stuff out of the waterfall, all sort of simultaneously. By then I'm soaking wet so I didn't want to really consider getting dressed and going out to find another shower. So I end up turning the water on and manually holding the shower head together with one hand while shampooing my hair with the other. Turning the water off, putting the shower head down, finding the soap, soaping up, picking the shower head back up and putting it back on, holding it there while I rinse off... etc. Oy. And when I get back our wig girl, Jen, says “Where have you been? What took you so long??”

So by 5:30 we just start shoving things into the hallway because we have 2 hours til show time. And the stage space is SO small that we have no wing space, no back stage space and half our deck couldn't be laid.

Note how I can capture the back wall and the orchestra pit in one picture...

Check out our ghetto-fabulous dressing space! And yes, those are full length mirrors laid sideways on music stands...

Then our dressers start showing up. And it's Bloomsburg at the University so our dressers are...wait for it... college students! Hip! With no experience! Hip! Who ask questions like “what's a preset??” Hooray!

So we have about 2 hours to teach them how to be dressers and then teach them how to run their tracks and then work a show consisting largely of running our own tracks and then double checking all their tracks and doing all the cues they keep missing. A couple of them were really good and a couple of them didn't do anything all night. Ingrid did most of her show by herself. Ryan crawled on stage to push a set piece that couldn't be pushed any other way. Corey and his flymen spent most of their night standing inside our quick change baskets. Jen, the wig girl, did a little stage hand work and then turned around and helped out wardrobe in between working her own track. Just another show... And then we packed everything up again!

Load out? We won't speak about load out except to say that the truck was parked on a hill so everything in the truck shifted down and we lost space. And this is a game of Tetris where we can't lose any space or we won't get everything on the truck so... well, so we won't talk about it!

Let's just finish by saying that we have 400 miles to go tonight and we have a 7:30 show tomorrow and it's already 3AM. That means we have to load in this entire show in about 5 hours. And it also means I'm going to bed where I don't have to think about unloading all these trucks!