The Humble Nailbanger

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.

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….

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….”

I wrote this a few months back…it was sitting there as a draft, mostly ready, when the strike occurred and I realized that reporters from the NY Times were reading this site and I suddenly became…shy. Strange. Anyway:

The Mrs and I had a pretty decent fight the other night, started as a result of my being a total ass about – surprise! – sleep, a subject much discussed around these parts recently. Basically, I go to bed fairly early each night in order to make early calls each day; 9pm is a regular bedtime around here, and that leaves me most nights with 6 hours, at the most. On this particular occasion, I was pissed about one of the house printers not working (to print crossword puzzles, natch…it’s always something so mundane) and took it out on her, lashing out about shit that we’d already worked out and talked to death.

When all was said and done, I was lying in bed – alone. I decided I needed to take a broad general view of things. For, as William Burroughs said:

You’ve got to take a broad, general view of things.

It was 11pm, I had to get up at 430am, and I was lying there just hating myself and that inexorably ticking clock. And HP for making a shitty product. And myself for stressing and letting the life/lifestyle I chose turn me into a raging asshole.  After a half-hour of fairly regular tossing and turning, I started to take stock of what was keeping me awake. Stress, worry about the looming day’s 10 hours of fatigued work and being pissed at myself all came up early, of course. But then I noticed how much I had a sort of dull background ache in a number of different parts of my body.

First, I hurt my right rotator cuff on a turnaround two years ago. Initially it was pretty bad, but I’ve never been able to take time off to let it heal. I stopped with the heavy work for a month or so, and it mostly healed up. It’s still there, and it’s cost me a good bit of sleep since. The constant pain has abated, but I still have a somewhat limited range of motion. If I don’t move it regularly, it starts to throb. Also, it “clicks” when I move it past a certain point, about even with my shoulders. The left followed a year or so later, probably because I was favoring the right one. It was never bad, but now they both bother me to the point where I’m always conscious of both of them. My knees are bad, my feet tend to hurt because I’m on them a lot, and I did something to my back last week that has been annoying me. And all of this was keeping me rolling around at midnight, just a few slim hours before I had to be up.

It took a while, but that the flashlight I was using in trying to gain that “broad general view” settled on something I felt was pretty relevant: there I was, in bed around 11, 1130 pm; angry, having lashed out at someone I love; in pain, all over my body and, finally, anticipating having to get up earlyearly to go to work. And in…a…certain….building….

Holy crow. I’m becoming my father.

Now, if you are a man, or if you know a man, you either have or should know that we have all heard “all men become their fathers.” That I had done so to such a stunning degree was, embarassingly, something of a revelation. I’m not totally blind – it happened by degrees – but I can honestly say that I hadn’t really given it that much thought, and taken all the necessary components into consideration up until that point. But that’s as may be. And it’s perfectly fine with me. The line of people who love and respect the man is very long, and growing. I’d love to be even half the man that he is, and it’s no problem to detail why…he has a warm heart; a phenomenal work ethic; a simple, offbeat, down-to-earth sense of humor…the list goes on and on. The fact that I very rarely saw much of that for years? Water under the bridge. These things happen, and I’m just as responsible, if not more…I never did the math. This lifestyle, all the hours, it just eats us alive, literally.  He did what he had to, and I’m a better man as a result of everything he sacrificed.  It doesn’t matter now, except that I have finally come to fully understand, respect and love him for it.

So what’s the thing that’s so obvious and embarassing about it?

As bluntly as I can say it, did my father see what an intolerant, angry, unpleasant, total motherfucker he was all those years and was somehow helpless before the force of it? Did all that stress and negativity just bulldoze him again and again until it wore him down and eventually knocked all the assholery out of him? I really don’t think so. Some hateful, crazy, unusually awful and uncommonly bad shit swirled about the family for a while, resulting (ultimately) in his retirement, a year or more early. Another piece of all the stress was surely things that he saw in me that he didn’t like. Whatever it was, he’s a different person since he retired. I’m not sure if it’s all the sleep he’s getting (he told me with pride, a year or so after he retired, that he slept “past 6 o’clock”), not working all those hours, being in a place he loves (they’ve moved from the house I grew up in) or even dealing with tv people has to have a lot to do with it.

So. All women fall in love with their fathers, right? I hear that again and again. Do all women also love their fathers-in-law? Or is my situation unusual, in that respect?

What happened to him that resulted in his losing all that anger and impatience and left only the loveable milquetoast my wife today worships? I mean I’m sure that that guy is in me, somewhere…we’re very different, as people, but what do I have to do to learn whatever lessons the big guy has learned so that I can internalize them now?  Or does it take being retired from the shitstorm before you can really become what amounts to basically just a really pleasant, loveable and loving, pleasant guy?

All questions that I’ll answer over the next 20 years, no doubt.  But it won’t stop me from asking them.

So I’ve been “working” for a week or so on a project where I’m photographing myself once a day as I grow a beard from clean-shaven (as I ever get) to what I envision as something Moses would look upon with admiration. Maybe. It’s not a huge thing, I’ve seen a few people do it before – but I figure I really need something to keep me using a camera every day, even if it’s something as mundane as this, or else I won’t.

To that end, I’ve got a small setup in the second bedroom – we’ve been calling it the “studio.” It’s nothing crazy, just the camera on a tripod and a c-stand with some work lights covered with diffusion. But it’s sort of “set up,” in that it’s not moving, and it took me a little while to settle on it. Again, it’s nothing fantastic, just consistent. I thought about marking it on the floor, but then figured it would be alright.

Because it’s the “studio,” it’s got all the stuff in it that we both use to make whatever it is we make. The Mrs has all her paints and pencils and whatnot, as well as her easel, which moves in and out depending on where she wants to paint. It’s also a favorite playground for the cats, who fuck with everything in there, if it suits their mood.

They’d been good lately, and I was thinking it was pretty incredible that nothing had been knocked over…one of the cats has been rubbing on the diffusion on the light closest to the floor, but I’ve got it secured so it doesn’t really go anywhere. Then…

“Honey?”

I knew that tone of voice. It was the “I’ve done something terrible” quiet sort of uh-oh thing. The only problem with the uh-oh thing is that she does it when she spills water as well as when she sets the kitchen on fire…there really isn’t any pattern, and it usually makes me instantly stressed. Stressed because I want to get past the “uh-oh, I’m so sorry” portion of the proceedings and into what I need to do to fix it (or extinguish it. She’s gonna want to kill me for writing this, but it’s hyperbole. Kind of. She’s never actually set anything on fire. More accurately, there’s never been…..big…..flames……).

So when I heard “Honey?” and that tone of voice, I instantly tensed. “I accidentally hit your beard setup.”

Oh christ. That could mean anything. (See what I mean?)

“How bad?”

“Your tripod moved an inch or two. I hit into it with my easel.”

Whew. This was not a big deal. Obviously I didn’t want it to happen, but it wouldn’t have any appreciable effect. Who am I kidding? In all likelihood, even I wouldn’t be able to notice. I’m not shooting the Corpse Bride, or some other stop-motion thing where the camera absolutely, positively CANNOT MOVE. So the thing moved a couple inches….

“That’s sucks, but it’s ok.  No big deal. Really.”

“Really? OK.”

And because I didn’t really give it any further thought, I was surprised that she mentioned it to her father, who is absolutely great. He’s a bit of a Humble Nailbanger himself, except of the crane-operating, bus- and cab-driving variety; a truly great man of simple tastes and with the kind of simple spirit that is indicative of a huge heart and a completely ideal grasp on what’s important. He’s lived a really quiet humble life and seems to have wrung enjoyment out of every moment of it.

Even though I was surprised that the Mrs mentioned it to her father:

“I don’t know why he didn’t put any markers down or anything.”

I can’t say that I was surprised at his answer:

“Ah, forget the markers. Just tell him to shave his beard and start all over again.”

So what? You’ll still grow a beard, just wipe it all out and start over. I swear I’d love to sit down with him for a few months and write a guide to life.

Here’s a photo I made of his hands a few years back:

I’m not one to brag, but the Mrs has been painting a series of Afghani women who have been subject to some pretty horrific shit.  Below are two images, the left a finished watercolor, the right is oil paint on wood, and is mostly done: