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« on: Jan 11, 2016, 07:09 pm »
A couple years after high school, a guy that I had gone to school with started up a youth summer theatre company through the local parks & rec dept. It has become now more of a standard summer camp program, where they meet daily for two weeks and present a showcase at the end of the session, and then the next session starts. But in the first summer, it was a single three-week session to put on a fully-staged production of a musical. He contacted me saying "I'm directing it, our other friend from high school is choreographing, someone else I know is coming in as MD, do you want to stage manage it?" So I said yes. It was really hard but really fun! And then after the final performance, the woman from the parks & rec dept was there to hand out checks to the counselors. A check and an envelope full of coupons from sponsors. This is when I learned that there was not a check for me. They had budgeted for three counselors (which, if it had been a regular day camp, would have been more than enough for the number of kids we had) and it wasn't their fault that the director had elected to take on a fourth counselor, which was not required for the camper-counselor ratio. The parks folks don't know anything about theatre and don't understand what a stage manager does, so from their POV they viewed me as unnecessary to the operation of their day camp.
The other three counselors, rather than paying me out of their own pockets (which is what I would have done if I was them), banded together to give me their coupons. So I got like. 15 coupons for restaurants I've never heard of, landscaping services, printing services, etc. For three weeks of work as a combination camp counselor-stage manager.