PROPS: The hardest thing you've had to do in the dark.

[yomanda]

Our local community theater recently performed The Diary of Anne Frank.  We had a very limited number of people helping backstage, so I was very involved in moving things during the scene changes.  There was a rather large kitchen table that had a green tablecloth added to it between the first and second scenes of Act I.  I found putting a table cloth on straight in the dark in a hurry to be rather difficult.  After trying several different methods, I settled on using 2 small safety pins on the upstage side of the tablecloth that go exactly over the corners of the table so I could go by feel.  It worked reasonably well, and no one but me ever said anything if it was less than perfectly straight. 

What are some of the most difficult things that had to be accomplished quickly in the dark during a show you worked?

[tempest_gypsy]

I did a production of Chinamen in college, in a small thrust space with a TINY "backstage," a corridor about two and a half feet wide immediattely behind the US wall with three doorways into the performance space.  The director told me, "I'd only do this show with you as my SM, because you're the only person I know who could handle it."  If you're not familiar with the show, it's a one act British dinner party farce, in which two actors play five characters.
Lights actually took their own cues, just up at the beginning and down at the end, and because of the limited space, I was the entirely of the crew; another person wouldn't fit.  I had to wear a black mask and gloves because of the doors and their sight lines.  I had to be invisible while being, frequently, in full view of a third of the audience.
Catching the fully set dinner table from the actress who then had to crawl under my legs to make her next entrance at the other end of the stage ten seconds later was a little tricky, but not the worst.  Late, simultaneously I was helping with a quick change with one hand, pounding on a wall with another, kicking over a crash box with one foot, and screaming, "Mummy, MUMMY!  There's a lady and a man FIGHTING in the bathroom!" (in posh accent) at the top of my lungs.  In the dark.  Half blindfolded by my no-face mask.
After that, I can do ANYTHING in the dark!

[On_Headset]

What are some of the most difficult things that had to be accomplished quickly in the dark during a show you worked?

Moving a piano. The director wanted a large, functioning grand piano, so we borrowed one of the orchestral concert pianos from the Department of Music, and they explicitly forbade us from taping or marking any part of it in any way. Moving it in the dark was a matter of walking into its general vicinity, reaching into the air, and praying you hit a part of it which you could push without it snapping off.

[PSMKay]

Morning Star back in '99.  We had to quickly set a feast/banquet table in a tight area for a family of 10 in plain sight of the audience.  Candles, real perishables, some prop food, special people got special glasses - all of it.  We had a crew of ... I want to say six or eight people and the preset for that particular shift was about a page and a half long.  The transition came during a moment where absolutely NOTHING was happening on stage and the LD didn't think it right to pull the audience out of the moment in a period piece by making them watch a visible crew.  So, we didn't get blue glow, we didn't get anything.  Just a whole lot of interns trying desperately to be fast, speedy, and not fling instant potatoes everywhere.

[Lizzie]

[...] a whole lot of [people] trying desperately to be fast, speedy, and not fling instant potatoes everywhere.

I think that's going to be my new quote for trying to describe ASMing. Thanks Kay !

[PSMKay]

Ha!  In retrospect I think I meant to say "fast, silent and ... potatoes" but failed at the hasty rhetoric.  If you like it, though, by all means you can use either.  The glitchy version has a nice amount of redundant irony.

[missliz]

Similar to on_headset, mine was a piano. However, it was a giant lightbox with no handles that two dancers danced on. (BIG, clearly.) Besides that it was large and unwieldy, due to limited backstage space it had to basically be parallel parked between two couches, taken out, then returned to the same space, all in the dark and quietly. I failed parallel parking in a car in the daytime....in the dark was not any better!

[stagebear]

I didn't have to do this one personally, but one of me crew members had this for a change:

open fake wall
open back of oven
remove pot full of figurines
insert pot of "melted" figurines
close back of oven
close fake wall
call "clear"

all in about 20sec and all without making any noise with the metal pots against the oven racks.

one night i didn't get a "clear" and couldn't get her to respond on com. she had closed her headset in the wall and was trying with all her might not to let the cast onstage hear her laughing while trying to figure out how to get it back.

[babens]

I haven't had to do this, but at Great Lakes Theater Festival there is run crew track that is commonly referred to as "armoire boy" for their production of A Christmas Carol.  There is a rather large set piece that is a rolling armoire on one side, a clock on the other, that also becomes Scrooge's door that Marley's face is seen in.  "Armoire boy" is the run crew member who is inside this piece for about the first 20-25 minutes of Act I (until Christmas Past takes Scrooge out of his room).  During the time spent in there that crew member has several somewhat complicated patterns that he must follow as the locations shift, relying on the spiked patterns to follow as they look down at their feet, while moving this box around them.  It was not uncommon, especially during tech, to hear a plaintive "I'm lost, where am I?" coming over the headsets (luckily, at least by the time I began running the show, they had wireless headsets for armoire boy).

[cschott]

Well since I have two children, I think the correct answer for me is "change a diaper", but I assume you mean while stage managing

For one version of A Christmas Carol that I did the director wanted Marley to move a chair by magic, which we did oh-so-low-tech by simply tying a piece of fishing line to one leg and stationing me in the wings with some heavy gloves on.  At the cue, I just pulled on the fishing line with all my might.  The tricky part was setting the scene.  It was a very fast change (out of the counting house and into Scrooge's room) with a lot of pieces moving on a very small stage.  It was in the dark and the fishing line chair had to be set and I had to start moving off SR before the bed came DS because it had to roll over the fishing line without trapping it under the wheels (fishing line had to be pretty well flat to the floor when the bed got there).  Also, the rest of the crew had to avoid getting caught in and tripped by the fishing line.  This one didn't even have to be pitch black to be a hard one!

[Aerial]

Keeping with the Christmas Carol theme, the last time I did the show I was ASMing, and our Marley flew (ZFX) during the scene where he visits Scrooge in his bedroom, and Scrooge's bed flew (winch) as well.  At the end of the scene, Scrooge's bed landed on the big elevator.  Marley descended through the little trap in a cloud of fog.  I had to receive Marley in said cloud of fog, detach him from the ZFX rig, give him the clear signal, and then give the SM the clear signal so they could fly the rig out.  Then I had to go to the other elevator, open the elevator so the stage carp could hook a swing that the Ghost of Christmas Present entered on, to the bottom of Scrooge's bed.  I then helped her onto the swing, while he returned to the winch to raise the bed off the trap.  All in about 30 seconds.