Brushes With Death (or at least, serious injury)

Edit: An old friend fleshed out the story a bit more...

There have been a few times in my life, when looking back, I breathe a sigh of relief with a "phew, that was close." Allow me to weave you one of those tales...

It was the very early winter, November of 1997 (imagine those wiggly flashback lines now). I was a strapping young lad of 20, in fact, only recently had my birthday a week or so before. I was Master Flyman for "The Music Man." I didn't corral house flies. I was in charge of the curtains and flying scenery...anything that was rigged in to the fly system. This show was designed as fairly fly intensive, so I had an assistant. That probably saved my life (or prevented serious injury).

It was tech week, as we called it at this theatre. The week before a show opened when you finally got actors on stage with sets and props and the other intricacies of tech. The show opened that Friday night. I honestly do not recall if this was a tech rehearsal or a dress rehearsal (only real difference is that you're supposed to soldier on in a dress. Tech is to "work out the kinks" so to speak), though I do know it wasn't a "dry tech," because that means no actors. There were definitely actors there, because what happened could have hurt or killed one of them.

During the middle of this run, I had a cue. Of course, I had cues at pretty much every scene change, like I said, this was very fly intensive. Part of the change over was to pull a scrim out. A scrim is a relatively light weight fabric curtain on which you can project light for neat effects. From the back you get shadow type effects, from the front you can make it colored for sky stuff. I'm sure you've all seen them in action, especially as a shadow effect, but never knew what they were called. Now you do. Scrim. Most curtains are weighted at the bottom by chain or pipe. Doubly so for something like a scrim which is light and without that weight could easily billow around from the wind created by actors walking. Now that I've set the scene, allow me to go in to the heart of the matter.

I released the safety lock, and began to fly the scrim out. After about 20 feet I felt a wrench on the rope, and vaguely remember hearing a ripping sound, followed closely by a loud crash. At that point, it became survival instincts as that rope started to move WAY TOO FAST in an upward direction. But not my survival instincts...

See, a fly system works on a system of counter weights. In the fly gallery there are weighted counters on a pulley system to help counter the curtain weight, and make the curtains almost effortless when moving them up and down.

All the weight was now on the counter side...so the counters were going down, and the pipe (what the curtain hangs on), was going up to the grid (the metal griding above most stages). Here's the thing: Both things would have been ultra bad. If I simply let go of the rope, the counter weights would crash downward with such force they may bounce up and out of their carriage. The counter weights carriage rest position was approximately 2 feet forward and 20 feet higher than my current position. Also, if the counter weights jumped their carriage, that would create an imbalance in the opposite direction, causing the pipe to crash from the grid, 100 feet up, to the deck (stage).

In the heat of the moment, I did the only thing I could think to do in this emergency situation, which is usually only talked about in hypotheticals. I grabbed the rope, and dug my heels in to the rail so I wouldn't go flying up. This hurt like hell, and wasn't really working very well. But like I said, I had an assistant, and he made it over about a second before I was either going to go up with the rope myself, or simply let go and dive out of the way and hope for the best.

With my assistant's help, though, our particular catastrophe was averted. We slowly let the carriage get to its home position, and then offloaded the counterweight so we could bring the pipe back down. The scrim had dry rotted. When I first made the up move, the force of its own weight resistance caused the entire scrim to rip off the pipe. In a case of dumb luck, nobody had been underneath the scrim making any scenery moves when it crashed to the deck (though Katy, an old friend(in the group photo she's directly above me) who was there, had this to say in a comment she left: "I had a brush with death at almost the same exact second as the pole from the bottom of the scrim came barrelling down a few feet from where I was standing and left a two inch gash in whichever set was directly next to me (the mayor's house I think? I have no idea, I'm old). " So my memory was faulty and there WERE people moving scenery right below, but it was dumb luck that the pipe hit no-one). Somewhere out there, there exists pictures of the crew tying a new scrim on to the pipe with this cool haze swirling around them. The haze, unfortunately, was the dust from the fallen scrim that was still kicked up.

I'd like to say that was the only problem we had with that show, fly wise, but that'd be a lie. This was the only scary one, though.

Here are some pictures of that time. One of them is of me alone, waving down from my perch in the fly gallery. The other is of most of the crew. I'm center low, grinning like a maniac. Oh, and ten years younger. :)