Inside Tad's Mind

Wrath of a Mad God, Raymond E. Fiest, Fantasy. On a Tuesday afternoon in 1982 or 1983, I was picking up my comics from Jack Dicken's "Comic Kingdom" on University Avenue in San Diego. I leaned more toward the Marvel Universe, and as I picked my weekly fix, the man behind me started to comment on my choices, and suggested that I might want to look at some of the DC comics. A conversation ensued about the relative merits of different comics and different comic publishers. I liked the Marvel Universe mostly because the characters from Peter Parker to "The Dazzler" had their own internal conflicts in addition to fighting off the bad guys, and the good guys weren't quite as invincible as Superman and Batman. It wasn't that they were more plausable, but it wasn't as necessary to keep coming up with new ways to challenge them. As we took our selections to Susan at the cash register (the real reason I went to Comic Kingdom), I noticed a yellow flier on the c...

Directors are creative and like to "think outside the box." This is a good thing, because it expands the art and creates new, enjoyable experiences for audiences. In the days of Richard Wagner's operas, they had to build whole new theatres to perform some of his operas, so I guess we should consider ourselves lucky that all we have to contend with is the directors tendancy to use performance areas that aren't on the stage. For today's post, I want to cover the landings (the areas at the bottom of the downstage stairs); we'll get to the stairs and the top of the proscenium in another post. Notice that the landings are both under the overhanging "orchestra bridge." (What an interesting deviation from the original meaning of the word orchestra.) Both of the landings, located on the downstage corners of the stage, offer entrance/exit opportunities for actors, so it will be a very rare production that will not use them. They also make wonderful places to ...

I remember a time, when I was about 8 or 9 years old, my mother was painting one of the rooms in our house and needed something to clean her paint brush. She handed me a quarter and a gallon jug and told me to go to the store on the corner and buy a gallon of gasoline. Back then, it was more economical to use gas to clean a paint brush than it was to go buy a can of paint thinner. What a concept! The other day my son Peter earned a trip to the movie of his choice. He wanted to see Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D. The movie was playing at three theaters. The theatre closest to our house was charging $9/person admission, and the other two were charging only $7/person. Our first impulse was to go to the more distant, but cheaper theater. But then we started thinking about how much the gas would cost to drive our Dodge van. When we did the math, it worked out that it was less expensive to go to the closer theatre and pay the higher admission price.

Yesterday was one of those good news - bad news kind of days. First the good news: Amy passed her Series 66 exam yesterday, and has now completed the entire certification as a financial advisor. She will officially start with Ameriprise Financial on July 30. I will officially become Mr. Mom after August 1. (That could be bad news for my kids...) The bad news: Lessa is coming home from boot camp without having completed her training for medical reasons. She's pretty disapointed. Amy and I are very proud of her though. She did her best. She claims that her drill sergeant didn't get in her face once!

In order to fully understand the challenges of lighting in the Empress Theatre, it is necessary to understand the limitations imposed by the physical and electrical capacity of the theatre. Lets begin where the electrical power enters the building. At the present time, the Empress is served by a 220v split line that divides into two 200 amp circuits within the building. One of those circuits is dedicates almost, but not quite, exclusively to lighting, while the other serves all of the electrical needs of the theatre. The breaker box in the orchestra bridge divides the lighting 200 Amp circuit in to several 20A circuits. There are one or two circuits that supply power to the bridge itself that used to be used for the lighting and sound boards when they were located there, and for power needed by the orchestra, and supply the house lights and fans. The remaining twenty circuits are each dedicated to one dimmer pack. One 20 A circuit will supply 2400 Watts of power at 120 Volts, and the d...

I'm going to start a series of posts on the challenges of lighting the Empress Theatre stage. And there are a lot of challenges.... Let's start with the main stage lighting, since it is obviously the most important performance area to light. The Empress Main Stage is the easiest performance area in the Empress to light, but the Empress' architecture still makes lighting it quite a challenge. Since the stage is essentially theatre in the round, it requires twice as many lighting instruments as it would take to light a similar space in a conventional proscenium theatre. The Empress Stage is on the small side, about 25 x 25 feet. Until recently, there were seats litterally on the stage on three sides, and there are still seats on the stage on the east side of the hall. Directors and actors need the whole space. At the same time, it would really be bad form to light the audience. So there is a challenge to keep the performers visible on the edges of the stage. As a performer mo...

When I was in high school, I had a sign in my locker that read, "As soon as the rush is over, I'm going to have a nervous breakdown. I worked for it, I owe to myself, and NOBODY is going to deprive me of it!" Now the Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is open, and we're past the 4th of July, it's time for that nervous breakdown... This past month or so I've been so over committed it's a wonder I survived. My lighting work on Seven Brides suffered as a result of all the other things demanding my attention: Two of the people that normally do the program layout were out of town, so the program fell back to me, rather unexpectedly. We had to acquire a license for InDesign for me to complete the program. The lady that normally collects bios and such also went out of town for a while. The result was a very rushed job that should have been done better. And to top that off, I missed an error that could have cost us a lot. We had to reprint one page of the program twi...

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers opened at the Empress on Friday. The show was sold out, and the cast received a standing ovation at the end. I made a blog post on the Empress blog to congratulate the cast on a wonderful job. A couple of folks commented on either the blog or on Facebook that echoed my thoughts that the show was the strongest opening we've ever had at the Empress. Then this morning, I found this comment waiting, The actors were wonderful, the set looked and worked beautifully. The sound was ok, the lighting has much to be desired. I would give it a 7. Since I designed the lighting for the show, I can't help but wonder if the anonymous commentor was taking a personal stab at me. And this is not the first time an anonymous commentor has decided to use the Empress Blog as a forum to attack me. Well, Mr. Commentor, for the record, I agree with you. The lighting for this show leaves a lot to be desired. There were major parts of the lighting that just plain didn't...

On Tuesday, Amy passed her Utah Life and Health Insurance test and background check. Only one more test to go. Ameriprise has set a tentative start date of July 30. She'll then go into a "pre-appointment" apprenticeship, working under the tutilage of the more experineced advisors. Lessa wrote and told us she's just gotten off crutches. It seems her feet got badly bruised with all the marching. One member of her platoon has already been sent home as unable to adapt to military life.

A friend of mine recently made a trip to Brazil. As we discussed her trip, it reminded me of the port call I made in Rio de Janeiro in February of 1990. This was one of my favorite port calls, but the story Betsy reminded me of was the currency. We were on a world cruise, and like all Navy ships in the 1980s and 90s, we spent a lot of time in the northern Indian Ocean. While we were patrolling our box of water, we were given a port brief for Rio. A description of the local currency is always a part of the port brief, and this was no exception. But there was a very unusual situation in Brazil at the time. It seems that Brazil was experiencing a very high inflation rate. I don't recall the exact rate, but it was in double digits per month. The Brazillian government's response to the inflation was to issue a new type of currency, the Cruzado , to replace the existing currency, the Cruzero . One Cruzado was worth 1000 Cruzeros . We were warned to pay attention to any change we rec...

A team of researchers from Harvard Business School and the University of British Columbia have found that money can buy happiness -- as long as you spend it on someone else. "Intentional activities—practices in which people actively and effortfully choose to engage—may represent a promising route to lasting happiness. Supporting this premise, our work demonstrates that how people choose to spend their money is at least as important as how much money they make," the researchers explain. "Our findings suggest that very minor alterations in spending allocations—as little as $5 in our final study—may be sufficient to produce non-trivial gains in happiness on a given day." Well, Duh!