A stage manager, someone's mom and 8 high school students

See, we've come up with a new system of assessing venues. The Pumpkin system. 4 pumpkins is a Blacksburg Virginia Tech situation with the low doorway and ceiling, unloading everything in the parking lot, our army of college student pushers and loaders that jumped ship in the middle of the load out, the crazy show in front of the Broadway drop and the two day out. We put Greeley at one pumpkin and Atlantic City at negative pumpkins; you know, just for comparison. We're officially putting Idaho at 3 pumpkins. Maybe 3.25 pumpkins from a wardrobe perspective.

First off, the falls in Idaho Falls are lovely. As was the sunset the night before.

And I got about 9 hours of sleep before the show, of which I needed every minute by the time the night was over. The morning was so deceptively calm. Just a normal load in. Except that it was into the Civic Auditorium of the local high school. First period? Load in. Lunch? Pizza at the cafeteria. Recess? Very Very far away. Potential for jokes over the radio? Many. We all carry radios to talk to each other during load ins and the show so all the official talk was interspersed with:

“I just want to announce that cheerleading practice has been canceled.”

“The science club will be meeting, however, to build that volcano...

“We'll be meeting center stage during the lunch hour to stuff Suzanne (our stage manager) into a locker.”

“Miss Oliver wants to know why everyone is cutting algebra class...”

Etc. Etc. Aren't we hilarious? The thing is, if it's funny in Junior High it's funny backstage.

Amusing elements of the venue:

The space so small that this was our wardrobe room...


The circular iron staircase that was our only access to our dressing rooms.

And, as if to really confirm that the theatre was built before 1970, here's a little something.

That would be soap powder... I haven't seen that since Junior High.

But things took a weird turn at lunch. On the way to lunch Michael collapsed so he took himself to Urgent Care. I ran the load in for the afternoon as we waited to hear about his condition. Around show call we heard that he had a severe upper respiratory infection and some possible kidney or liver problems. Needless to say, he wasn't going to work the show. Or leave town for a couple of days. Soooo, that would be me on my own.

And the title of the blog? That was my dresser round up for the evening. Good times to be had, for sure.

Jen and I formed the Wigs and Wardrobe Department and she was Amazing. Michael wrote out his dresser track. I modified my track so someone else could do it and combined my track with Michael's. Jen filled in where ever she could, Ingrid made sure my dressers did some of their presets and even our TD offered to do a couple of changes that he's always around for anyway.
It was a whole new show for me as I got to see parts of it that I never get to see normally. And everything went well, all things considered. Some pieces were missed but the actors were good about it; and more importantly, Jen and I actually ran the show by ourselves. Which proves it can be done, if we need to do it later. Michael's bill of health is still pending, so we'll see what happens.

Load out was cold and we had an abnormally high number of homeless crack head pushers and loaders who appear to have slept in their clothes since the early 1990's. We finished load out around 3AM and got in the bus for our trek over the mountains to Montana...