PART 2 - AND THE TURBULENCE BEGINS

10/27/2010
So , it's Tuesday night ...ok.. Wed morning if you are being Technical... and we are almost ready to close up crates in the morning and get them ready to ship to NY. So many new costumes arent here yet. They will meet up with us in NYC and there we will do the last minute fittings with the usual Tech week, which is really 2 weeks of 8 am - 10 pm 6 days, insanity. We load into the Garden at 8 am Tuesday the 2nd and open on the 19th. Lots of nights of no sleep and i will apologize to my crew for any lack of sleep crabbiness at the beginning, long before i get crabby!! I love live theatre and i LOVE my job. Not just the job with Cirque, although i do, but playing in costumes and being creative... always makes me feel like i have reached my own kind of Nirvana. I could do without all the paperwork... but its a sacrifice i will make. Cant wait to get into the space and get moving........and be home!
Halloween;
Ok, so home I am home from Montreal. Its Sunday night and I am to meet with my assistant in the morning to set up dressing rooms and the wardrobe room. My head is still spinning. There are a lot of costumes for the new cast members that haven’t been shipped YET and I feel we will have people not in costume come first rehearsal on the November 7th. No one else seems concerned but this is my job to be concerned about such things. I have never had an actor go on stage naked, unless he was supposed to be, and I don’t intend to make it happen now.
I have roughly a handful of band members, 50-ish “artists” (they refer to them that way rather than actors as they are more athletic in what they do? I don’t really know. I would think either was appropriate but I keep being corrected.) 6 dressers, 2 seamstresses, 2 laundry people, my assistant ( my left hand) and myself. There is also Johanne, (my right hand) who is the laision between me and the Cirque headquarters in Montreal. She is a goddess among women…not to mention funny as hell, and is pure pleasure to know and work with her. In any event I am responsible for each artists costumes, who handles/dresses them, where they need to be at what time, how they get to specific quick change places and so on. There are roughly 1000 costume pieces, give or take a few, that I need to be able to locate on a moments notice if necessary and run to the stage. Things are sometimes misplaced to forgotten in the dressing room. It happens. Sometimes it can be catastrophic…many times not. But it is our job to make sure the show goes on as the designers designed it… not as forgetful artists or dressers, or anyone, wish it to be. Tomorrow starts the mayhem.
Nov 1st.
During my train ride in to the city I watch, sort of, the sun rise - my eyes half closed because I am still in a semi state of sleep. The clouds are a dark mauve-ish purple and the sun streams up behind them, limning them, making it look like a turbulent sea with whitecaps across the sky. Pretty. Hard to really appreciate half asleep. I will, for the next 10 weeks or so , have to join the “normal” world and be up a the hellish hour of 5:30am… (again with the A.M…… that should NEVER be in my vocabulary EVER!!) for 6 days a week. Now I want you to understand - I love my job with a capital “L“, you will never hear me say I don’t , but the hours during tech are enough to try a saint. (Namely, me.)
I come in with my assistant and left hand, Ellen, and we scope out the dressing rooms and wardrobe room. There are dressing rooms on 2 floors (of course not the 1st and 2nd or 2nd and 3rd… noooooo, has to be the 1st and 3rd - Murphy really has to find a new person to torture don’t you think??? Then there are 7 more dressing rooms down a long corridor we call the crossover. The crossover is like one of those hallways in a bad dream that you never get to the end of and its either freezing or sweltering - no happy medium. It is my job to decide how many chairs and tables need to go in each and set up the wardrobe room. I find 12 cents on my walk through… I am rich…lol. On Tuesday I am to meet up with my dressers, Ron, Pattie, Barry, Jenn, Audrey and Billy, 2 stitchers, Sue and DanaJean and my 2 laundry people Tom and Aaron at 8 am outside of Madison Square Garden … did you read that people, 8:00 AM at Madison Square Garden!!!!! WOW! Sooooo out of my time element here. There are two large dressing rooms outside the wardrobe room. One will house, as we affectionately call them, “the Russians”. They do the Russian Barre routine at the end of the show… a thing where they balance on these bendy poles suspended between two of the mens shoulders and the third does jumps and flips and tumbles on this bendy pole no more then 4 or 5 inches wide. The other dressing room houses an array of skateboarders, freestyle bicyclists, hip hop dancers, gymnasts and rollerbladers.
After I have spent 3 days trying to get all the proper tables and chairs set up (because I have done this before) 2 of my dressers decide, without consulting me, to ask for things I didn’t want and changed the rooms. There is a reason I set things up the way I did. . Since I worked with these people last year I already KNOW this stuff. THAT’S why I chose what i chose. Do I speak Chinese, hummmmmmm? Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! ok. Crisis over. Snit over. Onward.