from Linda Essig, lighting designer...
7:20 pm Tuesday. Well….it's dress/tech and I’m having déjà vu – unfortunately, the scene that’s replaying is from 1985 when I was working with a new generation of lighting control consoles that would crash if you breathed wrong. Somebody breathed wrong tonight! The console crashed and then the headsets went nuts. The two very nice house electricians are rebooting, logging in and out, and rebooting again….but my fear is that all my cues will be lost! Yes, yes, yes, they’re all backed up to disk (a luxury we didn’t always have in 1985) so we’ll get back to it eventually but I feel badly for the company because we’re losing a lot of the theatres most precious commodity – time!
Ron’s been after me to contribute to this blog, and here’s my opportunity. I wish I didn’t have it! (Alexis is re-booting again…..wait with me while I hold my breath……..). There seems to be some connection between the light board problem and the headset problem. I’ve already been here from almost 12 hours and would really like to move forward so I can get home and get a good night’s sleep before I have to do my worknotes tomorrow.
What are worknotes, you may ask? Those are little (or sometimes big) changes or fixes I need to make before the actors take the stage for their 10-hour-out-of-12-hour rehearsal that starts at 11am tomorrow. So far, I know I have to hang a light for Matthew’s opening night curtain speech, and make sure there is no light hitting the cable the chandelier is hanging from. I wish I had had the chandelier in place when the lights were focused but I didn’t, c’est la vie. (c’est la vie, déjà vu, I wonder why we use these French phrases…..je ne sais pas.)
8:00pm – WE’RE BACK!!!! And, none of my cues --- except the last one I was working on --- were lost. And now, back to work……
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