Author Topic: You'll put your eye out  (Read 3248 times)

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PSMKay

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You'll put your eye out
« on: Sep 25, 2007, 08:59 am »
(Submitted by Kris D.)


     

I was Deck ASM for my college production of Best Little Whorehouse In Texas. We had a brilliant set designer, but this time he was bordering on madness: 14 separate moving set units all slid around
each other like a giant friggin' transformer to become the different sets. The five main units were all at least 7feet high and weighed hundreds of pounds each. Once they got rolling, they didn't stop! Our first scene shift in Tech Rehearsal took 2 hours. I managed to get the shifts down to no longer than 54 seconds for the biggest one, 23 seconds for the smallest. The Director had a fit because he said they were way too long. I ignored him. Anyway that's just the back story. In the second night
Performance, one of my Run Crew comes flying offstage at the end of a scene shift whispering frantically to me that the stage pin that locks one half of the huge double staircase to the floor did not throw home properly. So this monstrous, castered staircase is about to be danced on with a
kick line of half naked girls and the only thing holding it to the floor is NOTHING! I gesture frantically at the rest of my crew ushering them all under the stairs with me where we all immediately grab on to the legs and plant ourselves as firmly to the floor as possible. And the whores danced away as we learned what car shock absorbers felt like. The scene was long, and it was hot under there. So we all had to take our shirts off so we didn't melt and then put them on again, and all come spewing out from under the stairs for the next scene shift. After that, we were never able to consistently get the stairs to lock properly so we inevitably had to dive under the stairs at least once or twice per performance. What a run.

     

And then there was the time my eye bled.

     

Same show. The actress playing the waitress was your quintessential egomaniac who had no idea the world
didn't revolve around her. Remember those high-speed, several hundred pound, death machine, transforming set pieces
I mentioned? Well, despite my telling her innumerable times to NOT STAND THERE, YOU COULD DIE!, she
insisted on standing right in the middle of their staging area backstage during the scene shift before her entrance, holding her prop: a ceramic plate. Well, one time, as she was sidestepping a 500 pound, 7foot tall behemoth of a bedroom unit hurtling past her at approximately Mach 10, she dropped her plate, bringing the scene shift to a literally screeching halt as everyone tried not to run into
each other or get ceramic chips rolled up into the casters. Everyone, including me, dove to pick up the pieces. As
I stood up I raised my eyebrow right into a particularly sharp piece of plate that an actor had picked up and was simply standing there holding at my
current eye level. I shoved the idiot out of the way and went on to finish the scene change, and
couldn't figure out why I couldn't see out of one eye. Till i got backstage to a mirror and saw the blood pouring down my eye from the gash just above it. Sigh. Thankfully, it
wasn't that bad, and I was able to clean and bandage it well enough to finish the show. But
I was a bit unhappy. We all have our off days, I guess.