The Humble Nailbanger

Perhaps it would be best to start this post with a few examples:A head of department, well into his 70s, still in possession of relatively good health (he is, after all, still able to make all those 4, 5 and 6 am calls), who has worked full-on “stagehand hours” (12, 14, 16 hours in the studio a day) for decades. And who, when asked why he doesn’t just pack it in, says “I don’t have anything else to do.”

A board op who came back from major surgery and who still has a pretty busted up body part (and will continue to have said busted up body part for many, many months to come, rehabilitation or no), who was eligible for long-term disability (and if I wrote about which body part, you’d say (with a wince) “whoa, he came back 1.5 weeks after that??!!”) yet was trying to come back to work one week later. What stopped him? Migraines from the pain medication.

I’m acquainted with another head of department, in a different local from the one I work in, who had a double knee replacement and labored to get back to work as soon as possible, despite his 70+ years, the commute, and the advice of his doctors.

There was a kindly old gent I last worked with 10 years ago. A lovely man, really, with a disposition that was unmatched in its sunniness. But even though he was working daily 3 or 4 am calls for electrics in his late 70s and early 80s (I worked with and around him for about 3 years), he was never really 100% cognizant of the entirety of what was going on around him…he often called me by my grandfather’s name, having worked with him 3 or 4 decades previous; or he might ask, during the morning focus for a soap, when “the contestants are showing up.” He loved manning the bottom of a genie, but he couldn’t hear even the simplest of directions, like “forward,” “back a bit,” or “please stop, you’re pushing me right into a red-hot 5k.”

What’s the connection here? Well, first and most obvious they’re all stagehands. They’re also people I’ve come to think of as “lifers,” and a life-form I’m struggling to fully understand.

What’s a lifer? To me, it’s someone who has become so fully immersed in the world of the stagehand - multiple calls during the day, often at different studios/theaters/a combination of both; the looooooong hours; never really seeing the family you’re killing yourself to provide for; the constant “busy-ness” that keeps you from developing a life outside of the business. I can’t really even quantify how many people I’ve worked with who sacrificed their lives (in terms of time, not actual mortality) for the finer things….big houses, cars, pools, boats.

Hell, the first week I was working in corporate, I was talking about how one can actually be comfortable working as a stagehand, with sniggers from all the suits around me. The next day or so? The cover of one of the New York rags talking about stagehands who made more than some of the highest ranking front-office guys at some theaters around the city.

Yeah, they can. But no one mentions the catch, which is that you never see your family, your home, or any of the other things you’re working all those hours to have.

And there are a lot of these guys in my universe now. I can never figure it out…one would think that you work these hours to make a ton of cash, then get out while you’re still healthy enough to enjoy it. But that’s not the case, a lot of the time.

So what is it? Is it some strange combination of the many somewhat unique aspects of life as a stagehand? Is it because we spend so much time together, that to some folks we become a family as real as our actual one? Or is it that there’s some element of what we do that’s excitement that’s tough to replace? Or is it that you can exist, as a head of department, as someone who can live in our world, normally filled with labor and effort, and just show up, give some direction, and that’s it?

I don’t know. It all seems totally crazy to me. I guess one thing I’m searching for is “why?” Were they predisposessed to it, just not having any interests in general, and work was something that helped them pass the time? Do these guys just need to have some books handed to them?

Sam commented on the stagehand primer link I recently posted, more specifically about the author, Mick Alderson. That started me thinking about a few things. Let me respond to and riff off of his thing. First:

I’ve worked with Mick for years now. He’s GREAT to work with. Also taught me a sizable chunk of my apprenticeship base knowledge on the job-site. And was one of the only Sr. hands willing give me an answer to the question “why?” in almost every instance. I want to mention this is appreciated coming from a once young lad who knew nothing about theater.

Kudos to Mick. He wrote a great primer, and now we’re discovering that he’s an all around good stagehand as well, as far as taking someone under his wing and having lotsa patience for the new guy(s).

I’m sure that this isn’t an isolated stagehand thing, but I think at some point or another, we’ve all been taken under someone’s wing at one point or another. It’s got to be a time-honored tradition, I imagine, the method by which common knowledge becomes common, and is passed down over the years.

What’s funny, though, is that I re-examined many of my memories of the guys who - to varying extents - made sure I was not only learning what I needed to know, but also was exposed to the many tips and tricks and little details that might take you a ton of time to learn on your own. For the most part, I realized that many of them were really cantankerous bastards who had little to no patience for many of the other guys in the studio. How is it that they had time for the new guy?

One fine gentleman who taught me much of what I know about electrics was a really rude older guy with a gambling problem, a seemingly endless taste for massage parlors, visiting them so often it could be called a hobby. He refused to speak with 90% of all the various crews in the studio…and by “refused to speak” I mean totally refused to speak to them. If they asked him a question, he would simply turn his back. The other ten percent? He would do nothing but argue. The mental image I have of him is either with his mouth open really wide as he was yelling at any of the numerous people he had screaming matches with every day, or of him gesticulating wildly as he walked away from said numerous people. Yet he had endless time for me and my many really basic and stupid questions.

In fact, every morning, he would seek me out. We were working in the soaps, and he’d go over the lighting plan with me, set by set…telling me what all the symbols meant, letting me know what “hidden things” were going on…what the LD (lighting director…I don’t want to assume) wanted that he/she wasn’t saying on the plot. Why each light was where it was, and why it was focussed where it was focussed. How the day would go, and why.

So basically, this guy, who was in every other respect a totally irritable, nasty fuck (pardon my french, but it really does apply here) spent serious time showing me the ins and outs of the business. How does that happen? Was he looking for a friend? Was he hoping to have a member of the crew who did things his way? Was he just like that? I’ll never know. Either he’s dead, or working somewhere I’ll never get around to visiting.

But the whole idea really boggles my mind sometimes. There are guys who couldn’t spend ten minutes in a room with an inanimate object without starting some sort of fight, and many of them took me aside to impart some serious knowledge to me.

Maybe I’ll work on polling some of the guys I work with, and see what I can turn up. This can’t be an isolated thing. If you have had a similar experience, write or comment.

On to the question. Have you ever rigged with a guy that attracts “Murphy” in increased yet solvable amounts? This might sound a bit strange, but working with a guy who has so much stagecraft knowledge seems to attract challenges from the spirit of Murphy’s law. Have you ever noticed such phenomena? Not to say it was ever less safe, just a welcomed bombardment of challenges.

You know, it’s funny, but yes. I have. And so have many of my brothers in the business…I know because I’ve actually discussed it with them.

Back when I was working with databases in corporate hell, there were a few different classes of people: those who just merely worked with what I was running, with few to no problems; those who had endless problems because they were incompetent; and those who - for whatever reason - always seemed to run into the strangest situations, even though they were obviously knowledgeable. It’s the same way now, in the business…tv, theater.

I think that what happens is that X person’s knowledge eventually winds up overwhelming the problem…they don’t employ Occam’s razor, and then they get in really wierd trouble.  The biggest hurdle is that they tend to start with really complicated solutions to problems on whose simplicity they don’t pick up.   The “solutions” cause more trouble, which snowballs as each one is implemented.

Here’s an example that led me to this explanation: I was working with a really, really knowledgeable stagehand a few weeks back. We were cutting some batten for some crap we had to hang from the grid for an effect. It’s nothing crazy, just 1-by. As he’s cutting, the saw started to go haywire. His first reaction? Check the blade. He started to take off the housing, when I put that piece of batten to the side and told him to try another piece. The problem? There was a piece of metal embedded in the wood.  Checking the saw would’ve been a good thing to do maybe three steps down the road, after all the obvious stupid little things were eliminated.

If he had gone on to check the saw blade? What could have happened? He could have dinged something badly, stripped out hardware, lost that one nut you absolutely shouldn’t lose, or any other number of similar Murphy-esque situations, all of which would set a few guys off mumbling to themselves as they worked to solve the complications of the already overly complicated solution.  The solution which, obviously, hasn’t yet solved anything other than to keep a few members of the crew from growing bored.

I also work fairly regularly with another guy who gets into this sort of trouble all the time, but for a different reason - he’s pretty ignorant, has no idea how ignorant he is, and tends towards solutions that work with what little he knows.

For instance, the other day he hung a lamp that didn’t come on when he had the channel brought up. His solution? Take the unit back off the grid, and take apart the lamp (while standing in the Genie, naturally, without making it safe in any way/shape/form) to make sure everything was kosher. Then, he wanted to check into the raceway that housed the tail he had plugged it into.

Of course, it’s pure pig-ignorance on his part…anyone else would just plug it into another tail, then start eliminating potential causes from there. But the solution he knows relates to a problem he had that was the most memorable and complicated, and his brain hasn’t really worked out the shortest route to all the other potential solutions I know he’s been shown (mostly because I showed them to him). But just looking at where he went, you could see how Murphy could take over in just about endless ways.  To paraphrase the old saw, he knows just enough to get in trouble.

So what have I arrived at here? Yes Sam, the Murphy problem is depressingly common, I think. If you have some good stories, post them in the comments.

Alright folks, please don’t abandon me.  I’ve been very busy buying a house and moving, all while working like crazy.

All that stress is over now (on to the stress of paying for it all), and I’ve got some (I hope) good stuff in the pipeline.  The good news is that I’ve really missed writing, so with some luck I’ll be churning out some decent posts over the coming weeks.

I was poking around doing something the other day and found this great Stagehand Primer by Mick Alderson from Local 470.

I may have written about this before.  Looking back through the archives, I know I’ve mentioned it.  In times like this, when it’s happening, it’s practically all I think about.  The wife yells at me not to stress, the few people I can gripe to about such things always wave me off and tell me of the last two or three times, so I don’t know.  But I’m pretty sure I’ve not written at length about being on the bounce.

There is no such thing as steady work in the world of the stagehand. Sure, you might fall into something that lasts for years and years. But it can ALWAYS end tomorrow. The star(s) might quit. The producers pull out because they’re no longer raking in millions aplenty enough to support all their real estate and possessions. The network pulls the show and closes the studio. The city closes down the theater. You get hurt. Your boss retires and someone totally new and unfamiliar replaces him. As many factors involved in the staging of a show? Multiply that by a factor of two (or two hundred, it sometimes feels like) and that’s how many ways it can turn on a dime and throw you.

And when it ends (and you can pretty safely bet that it will end sometime, in some random way, for all of us…) the only safety net you have is your reputation and your contacts.

Ah, your contacts. It takes a while to build them up at first, but then all of a sudden…perhaps I reached some mysterious level of competence - it seemed that one day someone asked me for my number, and from then on, I was constantly programming myself into various people’s phones.

You’re not always making calls, don’t get me wrong. If people know you’re looking and you’re good, they’ll call you. And when you’ve stepped in it and you’re into some solid work, it can last for years. But between those times, you’re on the phone a lot. Every day, if you’re good (or desperate), you’re calling around, staggering the calls so as not to wear out the heads who you’re calling. You don’t want to look too desperate, either.

I once was talking to a fine fellow who I’ve worked with on and off for ten years. We were reminiscing about a particular studio, and I told him that the head we worked for never hired me anymore.

“Really? Why? What’d you do, sleep with his daughter?”

I laughed. “No, I don’t know. I just….never get calls from him anymore. Does he have a steady crew?”

“Sure, a couple guys, but nah: that place is full of hall rats every week. None of them know what they’re doing. I don’t know what’s wrong with him.” He took out his phone. “You know what? Give me your number. I’ll call him tomorrow. I’ll tell him you’re homeless….that your kids are starving and that all their left shoes are worn through. You’re just this side of the dole and even though you’re a demmycrat, you’ll be damned.  I’ll lay it on so thick he won’t be able to pick up his phone fast enough.”

And herein is a dilemma. Maybe it’s just me, or maybe this is universal, I’ve never brought it up with anyone. But I never want to look too desperate. I’m always afraid that if I call too often, they’ll start to wonder why I’ve been out of work for too long, perhaps start to think that I’m not worth my time, or that I might have a hidden shortcoming that they never saw but don’t want to be exposed to.

Because I think all stagehands have worked with those guys. Sorry….those guys. Men who seem to have that permanently haunted look, and a thousand hard luck stories about how they had this or that booked “solid, I mean I was in,” yet at the last minute everything managed to somehow fall through. And when you ask around, because the guy might seem solid, you always hear the same thing…a look left, a look right, a roll of the eyes, a sigh, and:

“Oh man….that guy. Lemme tell you a story…”

And then you hear the other side of the story. About how they were always three minutes late, every day. Or stank of cheap vodka. Or were constantly breaking shit, hurting people, and in need of being showed the same thing every day, over and over.  Somehow, they don’t pull their weight, and they don’t know anyone who will let them just skate by.
It’s those guys I think of when I’m making calls. I don’t want to be the guy who bangs away every morning, calling every studio like clockwork to the point where the phone rings and the crew - to a man - looks at his/her watch and says “Whoops, 6:30. Must be X. You better get that.”

Being on the bounce now, I’m a little stressed. Being a new homeowner only magnifies it. I always manage to stress and lose sleep and forget that somehow, something always comes along. And that leads to something else. And ten new things to write about. So maybe being on the bounce isn’t all that bad….

Well, the Mrs and I have bought a house, which is why I haven’t had much time for posting. I’m hoping that now that we don’t have the stress of looking and haggling I’ll have some time to write a bit more. So….

Although I work in the industry, I’m not a huge tv watcher. That being said, I was recently watching Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations,” and this particular show was set in New Orleans, and dealt with how Hurricane Katrina affected the restaurant industry.

He was in one particularly historic restaurant and was being served by a waiter who had been working at that place for over 20 years. Another member of his family had been there for over 40 years. During the conversation, he said “it’s in my blood.”

This got me to thinking. Sure, I’m a third generation stagehand. But is it in my blood? When I first started, I didn’t think it was. But the more I do it, the more stagehands I meet, the more I realize that this is what I’m ideally suited to.

Having gotten a college education, and being told that my father worked the hours he worked so I wouldn’t have to, I came in thinking a variety of things, many of them negative. First and foremost, I looked at the hours. I looked at some of the things I’ve griped about here in the past. The fact that I was interested in books, writing and politics yet was surrounded by guys who knew nothing but sports and derided me for reading anything besides the NY Post really soured me.

My earliest memories in the business are of being continually mocked and being called “college boy.” (I’ve mentioned this before…it generally went something like this - “What, you don’t know how to do that? Didn’t they teach you that while you were off spending all your money on college?”) I just kept my head down…these guys were too fast, too quick on the draw with really snide and cutting remarks that still managed to be funny. I didn’t know that they weren’t bitter or mean about it. Making fun of people is a serious pastime in this business. I had never encountered that before; in my house growing up, you couldn’t really joke around like that.

Then the learning began. Over the years I’ve developed that really hardcore snark, and can do it with the best of them. I’ve learned that stagehands are among the most diverse group of people you’ll ever meet…I work with guys with half their teeth who can barely write and are mostly good for doing cues involving pushing and pulling. Stagehands who are writing books on the sly and who are addicted to reading. Guys who speak English with some trouble (and they were born here) who can finish the NY Times crossword on a Friday. In ink. Looking only at the “down” clues.

The fact that it took me so long to learn it was/is a bit shaming, but it’s taught me some good lessons…that I needed to branch out more, and that there’s a lot of strange and interesting and fun opportunities in this world…hell, it’s showbiz! And also that I needed to open my fucking eyes. It taught me to look past all the normal things one looks at and find value in a wide range of other things….that guy who’s really annoying and talks too much? Maybe he does the work of three men and always has time to teach you something. Never devalue someone until you get as full a measure as you can. You know, fun little life lessons like that.

Yet another reason why so many of us who live this life would never do anything different.

A friend and I had been joking around about “supporting your local ne’er do well” by hiring him/her on for a call or two.  Or for life, you know.  Because stagehands tend to have reputations, no matter what we do, as ne’er do wells.

And honestly, I kind of enjoyed the whole back-and-forth until I looked it up.  I had been operating under the assumption that a “ne’er do well” was a sort of shiftless soul, happily and with a good-natured grin trucking his way through life, one day at a time.  Maybe, as the Urban Dictionary slants it, with a hooligan streak (I disavow the “shitty fucker” quality in that definition, however).  Going where the wind blows, and all that.  Turns out it’s decidedly different….dictionary definitions are peppered with words like “useless,” “lazy,” “irresponsible,” and my personal favorite: “slugabed.”

So, perhaps it’s not too appropo.  I mean, sure…we do some good, hard sitting around at times.  But lazy?   Some  stagehands, sure, just like in every other industry.  But mostly?  Try this experiment: take you and a gang of your non-theatrical buddies.  Meet up with 10-15 trailersful of stage equipment, band gear, video equipment, etc.  Turn it into a working stage full of gear and throw a concert 16 hours later.

Oh, and then take it right back down and pack it aaaaall back up again and send it on to the next band of brigands

Sound hard?  Well then who’s the ne’er do well now?

That’s my everlasting gripe about my choice of profession and my brothers and sisters in the biz.  We can bloody and exhaust ourselves, working 60 hours in three days and consistently pull off seemingly impossible tasks flawlessly.  Yet we’re pretty much universally viewed as worthless, mostly because we are really good at relaxing our tired bones when we’re not needed at that moment.  People see that, shake their heads and say that we have “a license to steal,” or whatever shit they can come up with.

I find myself needing to apologize once again for the lack of posts…there were a couple loadins and loadouts, which have provided me with a wealth of future material, but robbed me of my ability to write much. So sorry.Anyway, I’ve had a few cues for haze or fog lately, and it got me to remembering…

There are a few different methods for creating fog in the studio or on stage, but they basically break into two main camps, both of which are fundamentally different: the chemical, and the natural.

The chemical involves “hazers” or “smoke machines,” where the operator plugs in a bottle or some sort of concoction that creates smoke when you add heat or somehow manipulate it. There’s a lot of downsides to the chemical method….they smell. Actually, they stink. And, well, they’re chemical. Not to mention that night after night, hour after hour of living with that smell…being hit with it when you strip off your clothes right before collapsing into bed, you can learn to hate it really quickly, and come to question the possible hazards and downsides even faster than that.

Living as we do, in a filthy, dusty environment constantly made moreso by chemical snow, whatever potions are utilized for a variety of effects, rat poison and whatever other pest control shit and - worst of all - whatever craft services has left standing out for 7 hours….and the whole mess in a big room that’s never opened to the outside, filled regularly with recycled air and then “refreshed” and filtered through the lungs of a few hundred audience members, the crew can really get behind something that doesn’t leave a residue on both the inside and outside of your body.

Not that we have a choice…it all has its own uses, and sometimes one is called for over the other for specific reasons. But that day they called for “fog,” which means one thing: dry ice and hot water.

Of the options, fog is the most fun to play with, mostly because the capacity for mischief and craziness is much greater. With simply a soda bottle and the cap, a mouthful or two of warmish water and a few lumps of dry ice, for example, the capacity for scaring the crap out of…say, the entire crew…is endless.

This was done in a place that will not be named a few years back with a two liter soda bottle….it was capped, placed on table in the prop room and the door was closed on the way out.

After the reverberations from the explosion faded, the door to the room was opened. It looked as if there had been some sort of catastrophic earthquake…all the ceiling tiles became floor tiles, dust hung thick and choking in the air, and everything was covered with…well, shit. In fact, there was shit everywhere. Everyone in the place stood gaping in direction of the…well, the “boom,” and the crew from the first floor came racing up, sure that a propane tank had exploded.

Don’t try it at home. And don’t do it at work (again).

I’ve seen this a hundred times….it gets passed around constantly in studios and theaters everywhere…you know the kinda thing…it’s been photocopied 10,000 times, the text is all blurry and runny. But it’s a good illustration of where we’re at. Occasionally I’ll say something to someone and realize that I’m “talking theater,” which most people I know don’t speak (yet). So:

In is down, down is front;
Out is up, up is back;
Off is out, on is in;
and of course -
Right is left, and left is right.

A drop shouldn’t;
A block and fall does neither.
A prop doesn’t;
A cove has no water.

Tripping is OK;
A running crew rarely gets anywhere;
A purchase line will buy you nothing;
A trap will not catch anything;
A gridiron has nothing to do with football.

Strike is work (in fact, a lot of work);
A green room, thankfully, usually isn’t.

Now the question is, do I want to explain it? Is it like giving away the tricks after a magic show? Nah:

In is down, down is front;
Out is up, up is back;
Off is out, on is in;
and of course -
Right is left, and left is right.

This makes much more sense if you think of a stage as the center of a world. And it is, it’s the world we’re working in. So everything refers to the stage:

“In” means down, “out” means up. Think of a piece of scenery during a show…you want it to fly into (down, towards the stage) or out of (up, away from the stage) the performance.

In terms of the stage floor, you have “up” and “down.” “Upstage” means to walk towards the back of the stage, while “downstage” means towards the front. When I was first learning, I used to think of the stage as tilted, which sort of forced it to make sense.

“On” and “off” also make more sense if you think of it in terms of the stage as a world…you’re either on it, or off it. And they work in degrees…if you’re standing in a spot and someone tells you to “go a bump off,” you move towards whatever side you’re closer to, because they want you to move more offstage. Either of these is modified by whatever side of the stage you happen to be on…”offstage” is always to the side you’re closest to.

As far as left and right goes, it’s whatever direction exists when you’re looking towards the audience. When you’re onstage looking at the seats, stage left is towards your left. It never changes, no matter where you are….left is always left, not necessarily your left. You with me? In the studios, there’s also “camera left” which is the opposite of “stage left.”

A drop shouldn’t;
A block and fall does neither.
A prop doesn’t;
A cove has no water.

A “drop” is a backdrop, and it shouldn’t fall. Ever. Things are bad if it does.

A “block and fall” or “block and tackle” is simply just pulleys working together to lessen a load and make it easier to hoist.

A prop, as I’ve said before, could be thought of as a “possession” in a show…the walls are scenery for carps, the light electrics, everything else props.

A “cove” is a spot in a wall where lights are hidden. Like a real cove, only brighter.

Tripping is OK;
A running crew rarely gets anywhere;
A purchase line will buy you nothing;
A trap will not catch anything;
A gridiron has nothing to do with football.

To “trip” something is to pull it up, generally with line.

A “purchase line” is part of a rigging system, usually how you control something you’re flying in and out.

A “trap” is…well, think trap door. Same deal, basically.

A “gridiron” is used in an Austrian curtain.

Strike is work (in fact, a lot of work);
A green room, thankfully, usually isn’t.

A “strike” is the best and worst part of the day….the best because you’re going to be getting out soon. The worst part? First you have to - usually after having worked 12, 16 hours, however long - knock down everything you’ve put up…lights, scenery, props, whatever, and put it all away where it goes, all while exhausted. Easy to remember…you set it before, and you strike it after.

And the green room? It’s just where the talent hangs out before the performance. It’s generally not in any way green.

So there you go. Fascinating, isn’t it? Yeah, no, I know.

I finally doped out how to order my damned blogroll, though I must admit I wasn’t really trying all that hard. What I was most concerned with is linking to some of the good folks and excellent sites that have somehow found and linked me. So please check out the sidebar and go see what some other knowledgeable folks have to say about the work we do:

OneNYCStagehand:  I link this site pretty regularly, but it merits mentioning again. One Stagehand’s view of things. With over thirty years of experience of working in NYC as a stagehand, I’m just another old geezer who spends a great deal of time in the dark.

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I’ll add more as I sift back through various links and comments…