Ya know, for an old guy, you don't seem to be very nostalgic. ]
I met my wife when she was a
Super Trouper operator at a dinner theater and I was the new head electrician. She shortly after switched to
props (no surprise), and ultimately became and is a Local 829 USA
scenic artist. We are still together, 24 years married, having met in '78. I have on our kitchen wall, the plastic "
Super Trouper"
logo off one of the machines she ran, a souvenir after they tore down the
theatre.
I also spent a few months on a tour of Chicago (the musical), decades ago, as a front light operator and got to learn some great operating tricks on a lot of different carbon and xenon machines (including a lime green carbon
Hall and Connelly at Shea's Buffalo Theater) from a lot of different and terrific operators.
How's that for nostalgia ?.
That said, at my
current gig, I used to have to train what became an endless progression of newbies on the carbon arcs. THAT was a PITA, especially as we don't pay prevailing scale and went/go
thru a lot of operators.
I will never forget one operator, we called her "The Duchess of Dim", after she announced one night during a show "Wow, it got really dark in here all of a sudden".
She was referring to the spot booth, as she sat alongside a Super that projected it's light out of the booth
thru a plexi window that reflected enough light into the booth to read a
book and whose who's carbons at that moment, had drifted a
bit too far apart and whose arc had drifted away, as the saying goes "Like a fart in the wind".
The xenons are a lot easier to train someone on and greatly simplify that aspect of my job, though I recall some none-too-fond moments of the 3 times I've changed xenon lamps, dressed in multiple layers of protective clothing that makes me feel like I'm dis-arming a nuclear warhead.
Steve B.