The Humble Nailbanger

…well, things happen.  In the world of the stagehand, there is very little security.  When one manages to find some, one sometimes tends to live it up, to sit back, take a look around with thumbs hooked under imaginary suspenders, and reflect on all the time one spent hustling to get right where they’re sitting, at that moment.

It’s a powerful feeling, friends, and one that your humble narrator has been enjoying for quite some time.  The lack of wandering throughout the various theaters and studios of the city has made me soft, and shut me up, for the most part.  Sure, there was plenty of everyday grousing and talking about how perhaps we might do this or that better, but nothing that really hit me so hard that I could overcome the inertia that was my not posting here.

All that has changed, tho, as I am once again “back on the bounce.”  The free time between gigs has me feeling the itch once again, so hopefully they’ll be more stuff hereabouts for the time being.

There’s a great tradition in the world of the stagehand, where everyone mercilessly mocks the hell out of everyone else in the crew, understanding that it will all come back to them in spades.

Sure, there are serious moments.  But mostly, we all love to laugh.  It’s rarely mean, mostly just affectionate in the vein of Oscar Wilde, who said “the only thing that’s worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”  In some ways, it’s when they stop making fun of you that you have to worry.

So when I found myself a while back struggling during a turnaround in front of a decent-sized audience, working with a focusing pole to try to dress back a tieline and finding that the pole was just a little bit too short, it was no big deal.  We all work under pressure in front of crowds who have little to do but watch the changeover. I’ve been in this position a hundred times…suddenly you find yourself rushing and making do in the blink of an eye.  So far, every crew I’ve worked on has been successful.  I’ve never been in a quick turnaround that didn’t make time.

I really was fine, working away, until one of the heads leaned over and said “C’mon, hurry up!  Everybody’s watching!” I didn’t have to look over to tell he was smiling.

“Aw, give me a break, shut the hell up,” I said, still trying.

He leaned in closer, right in my ear.  “They’re all looking at you, and here you are fucking it up in front of them all….”  I started to turn red.

“Get the fuck away from me!” I said, supressing a laugh.

“C’mon, hurry!  Hurry!”

Then I turned REALLY red.  I started to feel like if I blushed any harder, I would burst into flame.  I was laughing, he was laughing, the crew was laughing, the audience was vocally reacting to each move I made, “awwwww”-ing when I missed, and finally bursting into applause when I got it.  It was hilarious, and I was as embarassed as I’ve ever been at work.

Just another day on the job.

I’ve been walking around with this post sort of slowly coming together in my head, formed from a few different elements I’ve picked up from here and there.  Basically it’s about the ups and downs of stagehand life as a whole, how we’re viewed by the rest of the crew and the world, and how we see ourselves.

First, I noticed that I had been linked (once again) by Backstage at backstagejobs.com.  Thanks very much for that.  So I was poking around that site, and I came across this little piece of annoyance, where English-Test.net explains what a stagehand is:

A stage hand is someone who does small jobs in the theater – helping with the scenery, making tea for the cast and cleaning the place. Hand in this sense represents the person – an employee doing manual work.

OK?  That’s completely understates the scope of the job, except for making tea for the cast (?!) and (in some cases) cleaning the place, which stagehands rarely (really rarely, as in “if ever”) do.

Then, OneNYCStagehand returned after a bit of a hiatus (and I’ll cop to being one of the “folks with too much time on their hands” who was wondering where he went) and clued his readers in one where he has/had been:

I think many of us like to think that we primarily make our living in the arts or at least on the periphery of it. But even in New York City it sometimes difficult to survive on just a diet of culture. As we get further and further from the hot sun of the fine arts, away from the nourishing atmosphere of Broadway we’ll work in the cold outer planets of “television” and “industrial.” Even these can be satisfying when the technological gee-whiz factor is high enough. A lot of product rollouts and events have a lot of bright, new shiny toys.

So where am I? Out in the cold outer reaches of our universe, there is a distant planet called “Cable.” It can support life but it’s a hardscrabble existence. Orbiting that planet is a lifeless, gray moon called the “Business News Channel“.

Yikes.  Well, we’ve all been there in some way or another.  Not there there, necessarily, but in that same “universe.”  He sums it up pretty well at the end:

There’s more, so much more and yet so very little. There will come a time when I’ll get off this little moon. As the saying goes, “when the money runs out, so do we”. The Client can hire my body for a couple of hours or days but the money always runs out and that’s my ticket back to sunshine.

Where have I been? I prefer to think about where I’m going, thank you very much.

What does it all mean?  Well, there’s a great saying that I’ve often heard within the business:

Theater is life.
Film is art.
Television is furniture.

As little as some of us who work in the business want to think about it, for the most part it’s very true.  Television is furniture.  What we are doing is basically building and executing content that is just barely attractive enough to justify all the commercials shown during the broadcast.  And more and more often, the content is the commercial.

But it’s not only what happens in our business but how it happens as well that can be frustrating.  I’ve said here in this space that things are generally feast or famine, stop and go.  And that pertains to work and it’s availability as well as the level of satisfaction that that work might provide.

Many of us bounce around.  What happens in that circumstance is that you might catch a loadin, which is generally exciting and challenging and, if you are in the right mindset, pretty fun as well.  The work is hard and satisfying.  You’re able to watch something take shape, often pretty quickly, from the line of trucks you walk past on your way in and an empty theater through to a fully staged show.  The motors, the lights, the rigging.  There’s so much going on, so many people working, and most of them stagehands.

I always feel an immense source of pride that I get to work among all these men and women who are so capable of doing things that leave crowds of people agog, leaving the theater every night saying “how the hell did they do that?”

The Mrs always reminds me that the hours don’t matter because I love what I do.  And she’s right, in the overarching sense.  Why “overarching?”  Because after the loadin, after all the problem-solving and making quick decisions on the fly, after filling the space with everything in the show and shoehorning it in so it all works together smoothly – and if you’re lucky – there’s the execution of the show.

This can be fun as well.  But in many cases, it’s very routine…pushing and pulling heavy dollies, flying scenery in and out, scene changes both complex and simple.

If you wind up on a show that’s pretty cut and dry (as it often is in television), it can get boring and repetitive fast.  The thrill of the initial weeks fades into the daily grind of everyday tasks.  I’ve done shows that really are mostly just emptying the garbages and sweeping.  We do it without complaint, because it’s great to have steady work and sometimes it’s nice to have some mindless downtime, whether because we’re exhausted, sore, hurt, or studying for a certification and we can put the time to good use.

But while we’re doing it, many of us are conflicted…aching to get back into the action and the culture, looking to do something besides work a pickup and make sure the trashcans don’t overflow, no longer hearing from camera ops and stage managers about how easy we have it when we can look around and know that we built and lit everything that the entire crew is working amongst.

The show is live.  News.  The times are somber, the day was dark, matters stormy and uncertain.  The national mood is dreary, everyone is in the doldrums.

The news is bad, the newsroom feels tense.  The stories are of everyday people having lost their jobs, their savings.  Unemployment is up.  The market is down, and then down more the next day.  Crime is rising.  No one trusts anyone else. Homelessness is increasing.  The news hasn’t been good for what seems like years.

One cameraman calls the stage manager over.  The rest of the crew looks up.  He is known never to be far from a bag of sunflower seeds, and that day was no different.  He eats them like some people chain-smoke. His face is absolutely covered with wet, chewed sunflower hulls.

“Hey, listen,” he asks the stage manager.  “Do I have anything on my face?”

Recently the Mrs and I travelled some distance to attend a friend’s wedding.  As if the long drive weren’t enough, she was sick and I was in the process of catching what she had.  Grumpiness abounded.

It bled into the next day as well.  An hour before the ceremony, as we were getting dressed, the button on my pants broke.  I know, I know.  I mean, I was forearm-deep in the waist of the pants in order to tuck in my shirt, but they were tight to begin with. Too many on-set breakfasts and lunches and not enough physical work, surely.

So there I was…my arms out at shoulder height, sort of mid-shrug.  “Great.  Just wonderful.  I broke the button on these pants, and they’re brand new. Naturally I don’t have a belt, and I can’t wear the other pants I brought with the jacket I have.”

The Mrs slumped.  We both stood there, frozen, trying to figure out what to do.  Then I jumped.  “Hey, I have some line in the car.  I’ll just tie them up.  I do it all the time.”

“Once a stagehand, always a stagehand,” she muttered to herself as I quickly put on the other pair of pants I had on hand and gathered room and car keys.

I ran down to the car, cut myself some line off the bundle I always keep in the trunk, and returned to the room, whereupon I shucked the old clothes, donned what I was wearing to the wedding, and tied them up with a big grin.  “Nice.  That’ll work just fine.”  I looked over at the Mrs, who was standing there all ready to go.

“Good thing I always have some rope and a knife, huh?”  I said with a smile, while feeling various pockets for the car keys.  “Hey, where are the damned car keys?”

A moderate wait for the tow truck and man with slim-jim later, we were at the ceremony, and only 15 minutes after it started….

Anyone who reads this blog with any regularity – and I thank all four of you – knows that some stagehands have early calls. It’s not unusual for us to be up at 3 or even 2 am to go to (or be at) work.

When you have to get up that early, you tend to do some things the previous night to buy yourself another few moments of precious sleep. One thing I do is lay out my clothes the night before so I can quickly get dressed in the morning.

It’s complicated by the fact that I lay them out in the bedroom, where Mrs Nailbanger is sleeping. I suppose I could lay them out in another room, but I don’t. What I do, as a result, is get dressed in the dark, either by feel or the light of my phone.

Occasionally something doesn’t feel right, and I have to strip back down to reverse something.

Never before, however, have I done what I did the other day, which was make it all the way to work and halfway through the day before realizing that I was wearing a button-down shirt inside out. The collar was up the way it should have been, but the buttons were on the inside, tags hanging out, the whole gigantic embarassing bit.

I finally figured it out when my hand hit a tag on the side of the shirt. While I was crossing the street on a coffee break. Five hours into the day.

As a testament to how tired and busy we all are, an entire studio full of stagehands – who are so observant they’ll pick up the slightest thing to bust your balls over and then milk it for DAYS, and with whom I was working in close proximity for the whole time – entirely failed to notice. Thankfully.

“It’s really dark up here dark and cold at night,” his postcard said.  “This farm is creepy at night.  Danny”

The farm was a rehab facility somewhere upstate. The patients – “inmates,” he called them – spent their days essentially doing the grunt work in running the farm: cleaning stalls, feeding animals, working in the fields.   The walk back to civilization, should they decide to walk away, was prohibitively far.  Work was all there was, and it was good, old fashioned work that anyone could easily romanticize in cliched phrase…early to bed, early to rise, getting your hands dirty and some color on your face.

But reading that postcard gave me a totally different (and unexpected) point of view.  I pictured him wandering around in the inky black, sleepless and quivering, startled by the random noises of regular country life…leaves crackled by unseen feet, chickens and ducks muttering to themselves.  Running water’s quiet whisper and the worst thing…the floating eyes in the headlights of passing cars.  Night in the country is full of moving, watching eyes.  And they track you everywhere you go, keeping tabs, evaluating you for threats.

Just the thing for a paranoid old-ish boozer insomniac trying to dry out.

Something had to give, and in this case it was the crew with a bus pass to get there.  For years – decades? – we’d seen him first thing in the morning, walking in the studio and then right to the craft services table.  He’d pour himself a coffee, slop in some milk and knock it back in two gulps.  Then he’d do it again.  The third cup he took black, which is how he preferred it.  The milk in the first two was just to cool it down enough so he could drink it faster.

He used to tell me “Thank god last call is 3:30, otherwise I’d never make the 4am call.”  He’d come in and pound down those coffees, hoping that they’d dissipate the smell of the alcohol.  It sort of worked, because the coffee in the studio was strong almost to the point of being poisonous.

He’d rush through the pre-hang to start his morning nap, which most days was his first sleep of the night.  Then he’d stand tapping his foot all through the focus, looking to get to his second nap.  He’s disappear throughout the morning after taping started, turning up when there was work to do and vanishing as soon as it was done.  After lunch was better, usually.  On lunch he’d have a couple doubles and beers and come back a little more awake and in a jokey mood.

It was a shame, too, because he was so great at what he did.  He taught me a lot of what I now know.  More importantly, he taught me how to do things, and how to think about the whole studio, how all the pieces work together.  He was endlessly kidding around with all the members of the crew, busting balls from the director straight on down.  He never had his hackles up about the usual stagehand stuff, getting less pay for doing more work, being talked down to by the camera guys who were his friends nonetheless….none of the usual gripes seemed to touch him.  Outside of the drinking, anyway.

The next postcard came a couple days later.  “I don’t know about this the farming life ain’t for me  Still so fucking dark like nam but darker. D”

To a large extent, we all live in the dark, especially in the winter.  We get up far before the crack of dawn and many days finish up after sunset, all while spending our days in a windowless box full of dust and old scenery.  Recycled air and artificial light.  Even in summer, it’s not unusual to see the sun only on a lunch break.  It wasn’t unusual for a biggish percentage of the crew to just skip eating entirely, to just walk to the park and lay on the grass to get some daylight.

And Danny lived in the dark too…the same studio hours, and then up all night in a bar lit by two or three single bulb lamps, hanging forlornly in the dark with their filthy dented shades.  City dark is different though.  There’s streetlights, the blue glow in most of the windows of the apartment buildings, the endless headlights, lights in the pizza parlors and under the awnings in front of clubs.

The “dark like nam” thing was worrying, too.  Like so many others with similar problems, he had served in Viet Nam.  He only spoke about it once, but I knew that he had done several tours, at first living in the jungle until ending his time there in a helicopter as a gunner.  The one time he had ever brought it up, he talked about shooting out the door of his aircraft day after day after day, watching his tracers carve into lines of running people.  He never knew who they were, whether they were guerrillas or farmers.  He just held down the trigger.  He didn’t seem bothered by it, just amazed that he had re-upped on the condition that he be allowed to spend his next tour carving into lines of running people from a couple hundred feet up.

So who knows what it was, but things suddenly went from the everyday rough morning to much, much worse.  He was a private guy, so we never really knew what might have set him off.  He missed a week’s work and didn’t call.  When he showed up, he looked rough.  He had managed to shave, but a percentage of his face that was well below the whole thing, and in random spots, like most of his left cheek.

He had “got into some pills.  Been having bad dreams.”  He just looked so rough, had visibly aged in a week.  Things went from bad but sustainable to worse and really not sustainable for long very quickly, and the whole thing turned on that one lost week.  All those of us on the crew who cared went out to lunch together, made plans, collected money, made calls.  Someone had a connection, and he moved from the bottom to the top of the list.  Then there was a bed, that bus ticket.

But the dark.  A third postcard, “Can’t sleep but at least no dreams.”  Unsigned.

Then he showed up.  We didn’t ask if he’d snuck out or was released, but it was early…it seemed like he should have been gone longer.  But he looked better.  His formerly paper-thin, almost translucent skin looked better.  He had color in his cheeks, and the circles under his eyes were lesser and lighter.  He was early to work.

And then he wasn’t.  And then he never showed up again.

We only saw the note because his next of kin was listed as a member of the crew, and it was returned with his effects.  It was a shotgun, in the bathroom.

The note said “Fellas – Sorry about the mess.  There’s a six pack in the fridge for your trouble.”

The Mrs and I were working on a home project this weekend.  Because of the nature of what we each do for a living, we generally fall into the same roles with building type projects…me taking charge and her being told what to do.  This works most of the time, if I can be patient and not condescend, and if she can tolerate…well, being told what to do.

One quality that I can count on is that she’s always a great student…she’s really interested and she wants to learn.  I think that I take some things for granted, having in many ways pretty much grew up in a carpenter shop.

What’s tough, though, is knowing what to tell her or point out, and what to just let fly by.  Yesterday, as I was screwing some lumber onto a piece of sheathing, it occurred to me to teach her the whole “flush/shy/proud” thing.  I don’t know about anyone else, but time and time again I find myself trying to do something with someone who isn’t a stagehand, and my mind is completely blank but for theater terms…instead of saying “go right” or even “move towards the couch,” my brain cells are screaming “stage left!  Stage left!”

I didn’t make it a big deal though, it wasn’t like I pulled out the chalk board to illustrate.  I simply asked “do you know the whole flush/shy thing?”

“No,” she said.  “What is it?”

“Well,” I started, “flush means it’s even.  Shy means it’s short.  Shy, like hiding.  Then there’s proud, which means it’s sticking out.”

“You theater people!” she said, “you’re all such drama queens.  Why can’t you just say ‘short’ or ‘even’ or whatever?  Jesus.”

I responded “I think what you’re doing is overthinking a plate of beans.  And you just wrote the next Nailbanger post….”

Being a stagehand working on daytime television results in some really improbable situations.  I lived out one sparkling example a while back.

Now, the location of the studio where the show is taped is no secret, and just about every day finds a few people sitting outside trying to get an autograph or a photo with someone on the show.  And even if you happen to see no one directly outside the studio, you might find yourself behind someone at the local supermarket buying a sandwich to eat while they’re waiting for their favorite actor or actress to leave the building.

Anyway, a bunch of us went out to lunch at a local restaurant in the middle of a long day. There were six stagehands in all, mostly big, burly guys, all wearing black, mostly covered in tattoos.  Basically, we look like bikers.  We’re all friendly and quick to laugh and joke around, but just seeing us on the street?  People tend to curve around us as we’re walking down the block.

We go into the restaurant, a local place that we all go to pretty often.  We seated ourselves, moving together two tables in the back and squeaking our chairs across the wood floors.  Three older women were seated to one side of us, talking somewhat loudly as they waited for their lunch.

Sitting there for a moment, it quickly became obvious that they had been sitting outside the studio and were now taking a break for lunch.  My friend, an older guy who is always looking to start a little trouble, was sitting directly across the table from me.  We were sitting closest to the ladies, and could clearly hear what they were saying.  I kicked him under the table and, catching his eye, motioned with my head for him to shut up and listen to what they were talking about, which was the show.

I should say at this point that we spend 15 hours a day sitting watching soaps.  And I don’t mean that we park ourselves in front of soapnet.  I’m saying that stagehands know the soap(s) they work on inside and out….who uses what phone, what their sheets look like, what order the contents of their closets should be in, and who sleeps on what side of the bed.  They know the plot, too, much to all of our eternal chagrin.  We’re not necessarily interested, but it’s our business to know.

So when we overheard the women at the next table talking and getting one woman’s name wrong, my mischevious, tattooed, bearded friend couldn’t resist.  He leaned over, waiting until one of them noticed him and literally jumped in her chair.

“Ma’am?”

“Um…..yes?”

“I couldn’t help but overhear.”

“You what?”

“I couldn’t help but overhear what you were saying, and I just wanted to remind you that it’s not Rebecca who’s with Jason, it’s Racquel.  It was Rebecca who was cheating on Racquel with Roberto.”

She looked utterly shocked.  What the hell was this Hell’s Angel lookin character talking about?

“Wa-wa-what?”

“I just wanted to make sure that you were waiting for the right actor,” he said.  “You had the plot mixed up a little, and if you were waiting for the actress who plays Rebecca, she’s not taping today.”

Clearly she wasn’t prepared for this.  Is anyone?  When you go to see the Little Mermaid on Broadway, do you expect the main lavender seashell to be moved around by a 250 lb badass?

Of course not.  But more often than not, that’s who we are.

Has it really been over 3 months????  Whoa.

Sorry folks (all three of you).  The summer is scary slow, and coupled with a new house and all the work that comes along with it, I’ve been really remiss about writing and posting.  Rest assured that I’ve got a bunch of stuff sitting around half finished, many photos, stories, and musings on stagehand life on deck.