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 twice to fix it.
Then there was the yard sale and making arrangements for Laura Bedore to announce the parade from the Empress. The dyke on the tailings impoundment wasn't the only crash and burn on the 4th. Douglas, David Mounts and I worked on getting the resting of the lighting hung from the end of the "The Jesters Royale" performance until about 2:30 in the morning. We quit then because we were all exhausted and the smoke from the dyke fire was being sucked into the swamp coolers and making us sick. (UPDATE: the "resting" typo has been pointed out to me. I decided to leave it, even though the lighting wasn't tired, we were.)
Saturday, July 5, was the cue-to-cue rehearsal. Since I had been so swamped, I had only been able to see a couple of rehearsals, and I hadn't been able to help Douglas finish implementing the changes to the lighting pipes. Some of the instruments weren't hung (we never did get everything in the way I wanted it), nothing had been gelled, and there were just plain big holes in the whole rig.
To top that off, I had a meeting scheduled with Kennecott Land the following Tuesday, and had scheduled a meeting with Trent, Nolan, Joline and Rod at 4:30 on Saturday to discuss our plans for the meeting. I had to leave programming most of the second act cues to Mirinda and Douglas.
On Sunday, my father-in-law was sustained as Bishop in his ward. All day family thing, of course, so no time to work on anything for the show.
I can't even remember what day we sent the post cards out. Fortunately, Joline took care of that after I printed the mailing labels. But we were way late getting the senior citizen center packets stuffed and in the mail. They didn't go out until Tuesday or Wednesday. I had to play hookey from work to get them stuffed, because my evenings were spent at rehearsals.
After the rehearsals, I spent time fixing Porter's and my own notes. (I had almost two pages of my own lighting notes from Wednesday's rehearsal alone.) I was so exhausted by the Dress Rehearsal, I couldn't work anymore, but I was so wound up from the stress that I couldn't sleep.
Lessons learned:
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 twice to fix it.
Then there was the yard sale and making arrangements for Laura Bedore to announce the parade from the Empress. The dyke on the tailings impoundment wasn't the only crash and burn on the 4th. Douglas, David Mounts and I worked on getting the resting of the lighting hung from the end of the "The Jesters Royale" performance until about 2:30 in the morning. We quit then because we were all exhausted and the smoke from the dyke fire was being sucked into the swamp coolers and making us sick. (UPDATE: the "resting" typo has been pointed out to me. I decided to leave it, even though the lighting wasn't tired, we were.)
Saturday, July 5, was the cue-to-cue rehearsal. Since I had been so swamped, I had only been able to see a couple of rehearsals, and I hadn't been able to help Douglas finish implementing the changes to the lighting pipes. Some of the instruments weren't hung (we never did get everything in the way I wanted it), nothing had been gelled, and there were just plain big holes in the whole rig.
To top that off, I had a meeting scheduled with Kennecott Land the following Tuesday, and had scheduled a meeting with Trent, Nolan, Joline and Rod at 4:30 on Saturday to discuss our plans for the meeting. I had to leave programming most of the second act cues to Mirinda and Douglas.
On Sunday, my father-in-law was sustained as Bishop in his ward. All day family thing, of course, so no time to work on anything for the show.
I can't even remember what day we sent the post cards out. Fortunately, Joline took care of that after I printed the mailing labels. But we were way late getting the senior citizen center packets stuffed and in the mail. They didn't go out until Tuesday or Wednesday. I had to play hookey from work to get them stuffed, because my evenings were spent at rehearsals.
After the rehearsals, I spent time fixing Porter's and my own notes. (I had almost two pages of my own lighting notes from Wednesday's rehearsal alone.) I was so exhausted by the Dress Rehearsal, I couldn't work anymore, but I was so wound up from the stress that I couldn't sleep.
Lessons learned:
- Don't commit to do lighting and a fund raising event at the same time.
- Make sure the program staff is going to be available, and make sure there's a back up plan if someone is suddenly unavailable.
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