My World

I had a new cell-phone in my pocket during the last gig, so I took the chance to take a couple of pictures.

This would be my "front of house" position (rather, at the back of the house -- can barely hear from here, but I least I can sorta hear.) To the left is my old Powerbook, running Qlab -- for this show a simple adapter cable from the headphone jack was sufficient (for other shows I have it plugged into an 8-output Firewire box). In the middle the LS9: you can just barely make up my Korg Nanokey double-stick taped to the sound board. On this show I had three "hot buttons" for spot effects in addition to the usual play, stop, "rewind" controls. On the right is my marked-up script, and the banks of Sennheiser receivers.

Rinsing out the Countryman microphone elements in denatured alcohol. Normally I'd do them one at a time! You can also see one of the many cards full of hair clips I bought (and that the cast kept walking off with).

THIS one was taken a while ago, from my beloved Oly -- an Olympus Camedia C-3020. Sure, you can get more megapixels, and fancier this and that, but it is almost impossible to get this kind of low-light performance for that price point these days. Image stabilization, auto-follow, smile detectors, and other things that don't work so well, but good behavior in dim artificial lights? Forget it.

LIGHTING is where I spent much of the preceding ten years. This was typical of small shows in conference rooms, where we set up our own booms and ran extension cords everywhere in an effort to secure enough power. You also might have noticed I've picked pictures where it is difficult to tell what the actual building or show it was.

BUT THIS is the real world of theater to me. The back side of flats, the ungainly legs of platforms, creaky-looking escape stairs. Mysterious labels and a paint-splotch legacy of tens if not hundreds of previous shows. There -- wasn't that yellow used for the farmhouse in "Oaklahoma!" Or maybe it was the embassy wall in "Don't Drink the Water."