Tales From The Past: The Great Mountain Dew Caper

Okay, so I guess I'm not done. Another Pascal Center for the Performing Arts story for you all. Kinda reminded to me when my friend Katy commented on the last story, and in response to her, I mentioned I had recently run in to this stories principal player.

This time I take you to November of 1996. I was a strapping lad of 19 (just turned in fact). The show: Peter freakin' Pan. The musical version, flying and all. We even had a laser beam TinkerBell. It was awesome. I worked on the show a little, but mostly I was a pirate. Of course, all of us pirates were press ganged in to the "great house shift" at the end of the first act, when the Darling nursery melts away to each side of the stage while the children take flight with Peter. Done right, the audience tends to go "hey, where'd the house set go?" because their attention was focused on the actors in flight. But that's not the story.

The assistant stage manager - stage right was a guy...we'll call him Donn. Because that's his name. I love that gag. Anyway, Donn loved Mountain Dew. A bit too much. But he sure did love it. We had a fridge backstage, in which he had put one of those 24 can cases, those old cubes they made (at least I haven't seen them in awhile). He was quite upset when it was predictably raided by the theatre jackals on both sides of the curtains. So he put notes on them. I also think he would tell people whenever he saw them to not drink his Dew, but I might be foggy on that part.

Anyway, annoyed and amused at his undying Dew love, two of the stagehands decided to pull a prank on him. During the first act, when the stage is static and they had a good amount of free time, they took his cans of Dew, and punched tiny holes in the bottom, draining them. They then refilled them with water, and put a little bit of gaffers tape on the bottom. This wouldn't hold forever, but for the length of the prank, it would suffice. They then replaced the cans in to the case, and waited to reap the benefits.

Intermission comes, and Donn grabs a Dew. He heads out to the loading dock, which was kind of a hangout at the theatre. He cracks it open, and takes a drink. Makes a face, takes another drink. "This Dew tastes kinda funny. Taste this, am I going crazy?"

Let me tell you, the acting on that loading dock from everybody in the know was some of the best that theatre has seen.

He gets another, opens it, takes a drink. "This one too! It kinda tastes like water!"

Shortly after, he figures it out. He goes on a mini-rampage. He goes up to just about everyone that could be under suspicion and grills them. Nobody spills of course. He even goes up to "Chief," the technical director and the head of the fine arts program at the college, and goes "someone replaced my Mountain Dew with water!" Chief laughed in his face. Wouldn't you?

Anyway, Brian and Daryll, the stage hand perpetrators, ended up feeling bad. So, they bought him a new cube to give him at the last show. However, someone came up with a rule. I can't remember who, it could have even been me. I honestly can't remember who did, though. The rule was: Donn would get his case back can by can...and each can had to cross the stage during a scene, fully from stage left to right. Needless to say, this created some interesting solutions for the cast and crew.

Wendy had one hidden in her costume when she "crashed" (poooor Weeeeendy...) when arriving in Neverland.

The crocodile had some cans in it's mouth.

Lost Boys would run across stage with them tucked away in their pants.

The pirates rowed Hook across stage during the "rock" scene with about 5 cans in the rowboat.

All the while, Donn, was making a pyramid of his recollected booty, and, to his ultimate downfall, seemed awfully pleased with himself.

Ultimate downfall? What do you mean? you might ask. Well, someone decided that he was too "gloaty" and cooked up the cherry on top of this ongoing gag.

After the cast had their curtain call, and took off for the backstage area, everyone "in on it" which included most of the crew and the pirates, grabbed a can, thanked Donn, and drank them right there.

No, we'll never grow up. Not us.

Tales From the Past: Wet Tech!?

Hey guys.

Remember me telling you about my brush with death during a dress rehearsal of the Music Man? Well, allow archiving technology, and a hyper link, take you back for a refresher. I'll wait.

Back? Cool. Anyway, that show was seriously effed. Effed in the A to the max. Shut up, I like talking like that. So many different things went wrong on that show, and some of them were even perpetuated by us and not the theater gods trying to kill us. Like the soap in the town fountain/Oh, We Got Bubbles incident. That's another story. This is one of the theater gods ones.

As mentioned in the previous tale, the week up to the opening of the show is tech week. The night in question was our "dry tech rehearsal." No actors, only the techies, running the show without people around to gum up the works.

Allow me to set the mood in the most cliche (spell checker wants to change that to cloche...what the hell is cloche??) way possible...It was a dark and stormy night. Don't laugh, it was. That's important. Remember that. Things were going along smoothly. I guess, anyway. I honestly don't remember what we were doing up to "it" happening. I know I wasn't in the fly gallery, so maybe we were making some adjustments to a set, or something.

Whatever it was we were doing, some of us noticed a bit of a drippy drippy leak. Uh oh. It was raining after all. But we don't like leaks. Well, I vaguely recall trying to do something to keep the deck dry. That's when it happened.

It started to rain in the theater.


I'm not freaking kidding. It was raining in the theater. How is that possible? Well...

The place had a pretty standard fire prevention/containment feature. Fire on stage, asbestos curtain comes down to protect the house and audience, and fire doors on the roof trigger open so the fire goes up there, in theory.

The fire doors had opened. Which happened from time to time. But not like this.

From here, I remember a mad dash up to the roof, which is why I don't think I was in the fly gallery...if so, I would have had a head start up there, as the access was along the same pathway as getting to the fly gallery. As it was, I was like the third or fourth person up the ladders. We get up there, and keep in mind this is a cold November rainstorm, and there's about 2 and half feet of standing water on the roof. The weight of which triggered the door release mechanism. A group of us immediately got to shutting the doors (which was a delicate process involving slamming them shut and kind of "laying" on them to get enough weight to engage the "lock.") in the middle of a torrential downpour while in a makeshift wade pool, while some others tried to figure out why in the hell we were in a makeshift wade pool to begin with.

Of course it was a drain blockage. Leaves, I think. Thanks maintenance. I think we had another opening a few minutes later (memory is fuzzy there) but eventually the (exact opposite of) fire had been put out, and we returned to the damage. Which, luckily, there was little of. I was told recently that a lot of our electronic gear in the control booth got wet in a related leak, but as for the deck, it was mostly simply wet. We did what we could, counted what little blessings we had, dubbed the night Wet Tech, and figured that was our catastrophe of the show. Oh, how little we knew that the theater gods were desperately trying to get us to not run that show...

Oh, and I only recently got my feet, ankles, and lower legs warm again after the impromptu makeshift wade pool dip.

Here's another photo from that era. That's me, pulling an emo kid pose behind the piano (I honestly don't know why I look like that), and I apologize to my friend John for the really crappy smile he has on his face. He's the one who reminded me about the wet electronics. He's also Mr. Smarty Pants with a Masters from NYU, and is a scenic design professor at LSU. Go him. When I own my own theatre (yeah right) he's gonna be my go to guy whether he likes it or not. Girl's name is Gina, and not too long after this show she sorta disappeared. Wonder where she is. Hell, I wonder where half the people from back then are.

Tales From The Past: We're Clean, Officer!

So, my friend Ben (that sorta rhymes...maybe I'll start calling him Bend simply so it does) posted about his trip to a WV club to do some comedy between sessions of a (from the description) a competition that was a mixture of karaoke and American Idol. On the way back, he got pulled over under slightly dubious circumstances, as he described it. It reminded me of a time I was pulled over about 10 years ago. Let me take you back then...

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I was driving down a secondary road in my town. Coming from an acquaintances house, with this guy. He was decked out in similar clothing. He definitely had that large floppy hat on. See, Erik (that's what I call him because that's what his name is) is a blues guitarist, and is a very big fan of Stevie Ray Vaughn. So much that he liked to emulate him in more than only playing. No biggie. Well, I get pulled over. Also, no biggie. Officer comes up to the window, gets my info, tells me that I wasn't speeding that much, but they changed the limit and they're pulling people over to get people used to the new drop in posted speed. I'm like "cool, no prob, I'll look out for that in the future." He then tells me he's gonna run my info per standard procedure, but I'll only get a warning. Cool. He goes back to his squad car.

Five minutes later, he's still in his squad car.

Two minutes after that, another squad car pulls up. Erik and I start to get a bad, yet humorous, feeling.

Another minute later, another squad car. They're all congregating now, chatting and looking at me and Erik.

Another minute, and a freaking K-9 unit pulls up. Erik and I are practically in hysterics, though we're trying not to show it. For good reason: we know what's going on. We got profiled. Only one thing...they profiled us wrong.

They think we're dealers. I'm giving him a raft of shit about it being because he's decked out like a pimp. He's telling me it's because I look like I just emerged from a Walden sabbatical. But either which way, we aren't holding. I'm not gonna lie and say we were innocent guys or anything, but there was nothing on us, or in that car.

First officer comes back to the window, and we act "cool." He asks us that we've been randomly selected for a car search. I act like I didn't know that was coming, and that I believe him that it was "random." I know my rights, and I know I can deny them the request. But at this point I want them to learn a lesson, so I'm like, "sure thing Mr. Officer, sir." We exit the vehicle and go through the whole rigmarole. Popping the trunk. Getting patted down. Having our crotches sniffed by the dog.

Of course, they found nothing. Well, they found a knife, but the blade was short enough to be considered pocket, and while it looked like a switchblade, it was just a spring loaded flip, which is legal (yeah, I know that). Even still, since the car was registered to my dad, I feigned ignorance just to get a rise out of the cop. If he hadn't seemed so damn pleased about finding something, I probably wouldn't have and just pointed out it was legal. He gave me a bunch of crap about it, but in the second most telling part of the tale, put it back where he found it and continued to search.

The single most telling part of the tale? I never got that written warning. After ten minutes of searching my car up and down, they found nothing, like I knew they would. They then muttered half assed apologies and got the hell outta Dodge. And Erik and I proceed to tell all our friends about how Grizzly Adams and the Stevie Ray Pimp beat The Man.

Relatively Breaking News - Heath Ledger Found Dead

Heath Ledger was found dead in his apartment (Edit: Now they say it was Mary-Kate Olsen's apartment....Edit again: which they retracted...I hate the news sometimes). Saw this on several news sources including MSNBC.com, and CNN.com.

Holy shit. I was totally looking forward to The Dark Knight because his portrayal of The Joker looked to be the shit. Australia, and acting, lost a good son today.

It kind of scares me to think that it was reported that Ledger suffered insomnia because of his intensive research and immersion in to the Joker. What if it had a lasting psychological effect leading to a self destructive pattern?

Something Weird I Noticed

Mitch Hedberg released two albums before he died. One is Strategic Grill Locations. The other is Mitch All Together. Both titles are references to one of his jokes. But here's the weird thing: those jokes aren't on the CD of the same title, and one of them isn't even on one of the albums (Strategic Grill Locations).

Thought that was kinda weird and funny in it's own way. I would have probably named Strategic Grill Locations either CD Jokes, or The Jokes I Thought Of Today, both from his opening ramble about how he was recording the CD that night.

Haiku, Special "Movies You'd Have to Pay Me to See" Edition

Cloverfield opens
Godzilla meets Blair Witch?
you can count me out.

I'm sorry, but ticket prices are too expensive these days for me to watch a 90210 reject cast run around New York from a monster you LEARN NOTHING ABOUT in a "found footage" movie that's bound to leave you sick to your stomach. Yeah, you never saw the Blair Witch, but you learned all about her.

I get the feeling this movie will have a strong opening weekend, and post good numbers on the sheer fact that it was relatively low budget, but be a footnote in cinema history.

Make a Band!

Found this over at Culture Kills. Thought I'd give it a spin.

Make a band meme

Everyone has been doing this, and well, it seemed fun.


Let’s Make a Band:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
(you might have to click new random quotes at the bottom)

3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

You then take the pic and add your band name
and the album title to it, then post your pic.

I actually had to do the name part like 5 times, because there was either no real article, or it was already a band name (once I got a bands page, too: Rush)

More Things I Did At Work That I Shouldn't Have:

Look hard in this picture. You might be able to see me. I'll give you a hint...it's somewhere I shouldn't be. Dangerous like. Such is life as an event tech. Things aren't always in convenient to get to places.

Happy Saturday everyone.