Stevens R. Miller
Well-Known Member
Thanks! And that's a great thread. I only did three plays in college, but almost all of the problems/suggestions in that thread were part of my small experience. There were four of us on com, most of the time: the tech. dir., the lighting operator, the lighting preset operator (a job that a computer would do today), and sound (me). The other three were old hands, and were quite casual on the com. I mostly just listened. What I mostly listened to was a discussion about the physical appearances, genealogy, grooming, and eating habits of the actors. That started out pretty mild, but got fairly vulgar over time until, one day, the professor in charge of the Drama Department got on a headset none of us knew he had and simply said, "You should consider the possibility that more people are on this circuit than you think." There was some moderation of tone after that.
My two kids handled this well enough, last night. A big problem I created myself was that, as a ham operator, I use the phrase, "stand by" all the time, but I use it to mean, "wait a second while I do something." Last night, we kept restarting scenes at various points the director called for. When she did that, I needed to find the appropriate cue to reset to. Often, this would happen after I had called, "Warning" for some upcoming light cue. When the director said, "Stop, go back to when the princess enters and take it from there," I would reflexively say, "Stand by," while I flipped back in my annotated script, to find the right cue. This got me into dialogs like this:
Technical Director: Warning, Lights Nineteen.
Operator: Warning, Lights Nineteen.
TD: Stand by, Lights Nineteen.
OP: Stand by, Lights Nineteen.
TD: Lights Nineteen... Go!
OP: <executes Lights Nineteen>
TD: Good! Warning Lights Twenty.
OP: Warning, Lights Twenty.
Director: Stop, go back to when the princess enters and take it from there.
TD: Oh, heck. Stand by.
OP: Stand by, Lights Twenty.
TD: No, sorry. I means stand by while I find the cue.
OP: It's Lights Twenty.
TD: We're going back a couple.
Dir: Places!
TD: Oh, heck! Stand by.
OP: Which cue?
TD: Stand by, I'm finding it.
OP: Stand by what?
And so on. I really have to say that, for a thirteen-year-old, she showed remarkable grace under this pressure. (Heck, for a 43-year-old, it would have been remarkable.) Hams also say, "Wait one" in the same place where I say, "Stand by." Maybe I should try to adopt that phrase, instead.
The entire (adult) crew has been talking about this for weeks. Until now, no one really seemed to realize what a powerful lighting console our old Innovator was. That, and our brand new Soundcraft GB2 audio mixer add up to the core of a technically impressive performance space. The problem is that middle schoolers are mostly not up to mastering this much complicated technology, especially as an after-school activity (that is, you don't get course credit for it). The few that can master it are all eighth-graders. This means that, every single year, an eighth-grader who has mastered it must find a willing, capable seventh-grader who can take it on, teach them everything, and pass the baton to that seventh-grader upon graduation. To preserve that institutional knowledge, this must happen every single year. I'm not a teacher, but some of the other adults on this production are, and they have told me the harsh truth about middle school: there ain't no institutional knowledge in the student body, because the one-year window of opportunity through which it must pass is too small. In high schools, this happens, but not in middle schools. The only hope is for adults to do it, while trying our best to give as much of the work as we can to eager students who, every year (or two, at most) will need to be taught from scratch. I'm fine with that, if the school is (as it appears to be) okay with parents lingering around after their kids move on to high school. We actually have several parents on this production whose kids went to this middle school, but have since graduated.
Of course, this creates its own issues. People can become territorial, and not welcome the arrival of newcomers who are interested in the same territories. But, that's a problem in all social phenomena. We'll all just have to cope with it like the grown-ups we are
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