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.