First One Nighter...

We loaded out of Cincinnati in 4 hours, our record time. We drove to Williamsport, PA on sunday night, got there Monday and checked into the Genneti hotel, a cute old boutique type hotel and then spent some time walking around town.

We get up at 5AM on tuesday, are at work at 6 and it's quite cold. Jen, Michael and I get coffee and wait for our trucks. The loading dock has two doors, but you have to pull trucks up to the alley alongside, ramp down, ramp up to the dock floor and then ramp down into the theatre. And it's really cold. And we have the usual bad venue complement of scroungy guys pushing stuff. Then it starts to rain. So we scurry around covering everything with tarps.

Ryan runs out to ask if we can move the Foy box under the tarp, I try to move it alone and my little finger gets crushed between two boxes. Fortunately, it's so cold I can barely feel it but it's bleeding everywhere and I'm afraid it's broken. So I bend it several times to make sure it's not broken, bandage it up and take some ibuprofen.

And the day goes on. The show is way too big for the venue and we haven't yet had to cut it down to a “B” show so all of the cutting is done on the spot. For instance, Dorothy's house doesn't fit so we have to cut it and find some way to represent it for the show. This means our props guy, Michael, spends his lunch hour looking for a chair and figuring out a way to set up a railing behind it to simulate a porch and then constructing a pile of rubble representing “house wreckage” that the ruby shoes can stick out of during munchkinland. Hairspray had come through this venue last year and Michael was with that show then. One of the locals recognized him and joked “You were here with a 4 truck show that didn't fit so you came back with a 5 truck show?” Oooh, yes. Yes we did...

We load the show in right up until the last minute and then end up cutting some of the flying because there was no time for rehearsal. The local munchkin kids are cute but really demanding during the fitting, which takes almost twice as long as normal – frustrating given we'll only be there for one night. Jennifer and I get 20 minutes to run out and order food to go for lunch and work straight through dinner to get everything done. There are 2 washers and 2 dryers – neither of which work well – so we do laundry up until the minute the show starts and then continue to dry things throughout the first act. My finger continues to bleed all day and I keep changing the bandages.

The show is a disaster area. The video projection goes out, we have a 40 minute intermission to build scenery for the second act. There's no storage inside and it continues to rain and sleet and snow so all the stuff that was stored outside has to be cleaned and dried before it can go on stage. I can't be on stage without a coat because it's so cold there from the wind through the loading dock, but the dressing rooms – 3 floors up – are hot so for 2 hours I run up and down the stairs, carrying my sweatshirt and putting it on and taking it off. Finally, thank God, the show is over.

And now we load out. It took 6 hours and rained and snowed and sleeted the whole time. Jennifer was outside the entire night documenting the truck pack – so we know which order things are packed – and I ran in and out of the theatre helping her out and assembling stuff to be packed. We were wet and frozen and exhausted and starving by the end, given we had gotten exactly 20 minutes and one meal all day. It was completely awful. And we kept thinking about last year and how this we used to do this 5 times a week. The bad old days...

We finished around 3:30AM, making it a 22+ hour day, got into the bus, fell into our bunks and drove the 4 hours to Philadelphia where we walked off the bus into another load in at 8AM. And if possible, that day was worse than the day I just described. But that's another post all together...