After college, I spent six years in Nevada, living on the North Shore of Lake Tahoe. During my time out there, I got involved with the North Tahoe Fine Arts Council (NTFAC) and in the winter of 1992, participated in the council’s first-ever Christmas show, a play called Mary Christmas’ Carol. The show ran from (I think) Thanksgiving until shortly before Christmas and in addition to the play, also included a vaudeville show.
I was the group’s stage manager, charged with building the sets, running the lights, and a variety of other “behind the scenes” tasks. I made several friends among the cast, staying in touch with some of them for a while even after my return to the East Coast.
After the production ended, I was asked to write an article for Artifacts, the Arts Council’s newsletter. The article originally ran under the title, “Stop Me Before I Tech Again” and a copy of it has been residing on the hard drives of various computers I’ve owned since sometime in the first half of 1993.
It’s been more than a decade since I wrote this and regrettably, I’ve lost touch with most of the West Coast crowd. Bob would doubtless be disappointed to learn that I’ve stopped signing (Mr) after my name, but would doubtless be amused to hear that I still have fun with “The Name Game.”
Being the stage manager for NTFAC’s production of Mary Christmas’ Carol was an entirely new experience for me. Over the past 27 years I’ve read Shakespeare out loud in Literature class, attended shows put on by the High School drama guild, and been the Head of Security at NTFAC’s Shakespeare at Sand Harbor Festival. None of this prepared me for the challenge of the “behind the scenes” work involved in this holiday show.On the first night of rehearsals it didn’t seem as if we could possibly be ready for the public with just three weeks of preparation. Yet somehow, and this may be one of the origins of the phrase “the magic of the theater,” in just a few days, things started to come together. During those first days, while we all got to know each other, the show evolved and took on what would become its final shape as the cast congealed and those who weren’t able to meet the schedule dropped out of the production. The final result was a cast of seven actors, all of whom were determined to see the show be successful.
During this time, I met with my first challenge – trying to figure out what my part was in all this craziness. On the second night of rehearsals I started to recognize how the various scenes were set up (although they changed many, many times before all was said and done) and began trying to make a list of what set pieces and props were needed and forming some ideas (most of which I later discarded) as to what everything should look like.
Over the next three weeks, I spent most of my free time combing the thrift stores on the North Shore and in Reno, looking for props. Some of my proudest acheivements during that time were finding “Mary’s Chair” and “Pinetree’s Stool”. What wasn’t in the stores, I managed to borrow from friends (Thanks Gail! Thanks Dianne!). This included such things as inkwells, old-fashioned suitcases, and Mary’s desk and filing cabinet just to name a few.
Even then, there were a few things that we had to make ourselves. By myself, I went through more duct tape than an entire season of “MacGyver”, invented a few new ways of building things (did you notice that Rudolph’s nose blinked on and off during “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer”?) and still needed help to get it all done. Some of the people who helped out were Bill Griffin who built the safe, Fred Gifford who built the door frames, Eda at Incline High School who loaned us the fireplace, and Jim at the King’s Beach Thrifty Drug Store who loaned us an artificial Christmas tree.
Although it sounds that way at first, rehearsals weren’t all work, we had fun too. I won’t mention the incident where I put Cristina across my knee, other than to say that it happened, but there was a lot of good, clean fun.
One of my favorite things during rehearsals was when one (sometimes more) of the actors would be absent due to work schedules and prior commitments and I would read the lines for them. This had the advantage of allowing the cast to continue practicing even when not everyone could be there, but through some strange twist of fate, most of the absences seemed to be among the female cast members (for those who don’t immediately see the irony here, “Blair” is, in my case anyhow, a male name — Bob Tamietti, who is amused by the fact that I put a “(Mr.)” after my signature, will no doubt be even more amused by this paranthetical). This led to some “interesting” bits of dialouge, such as the following, which took place in the absence of the woman playing the role of “Holly”:
Holly: I hope I didn’t overpack; I just couldn’t make up my mind.
Mary: Don’t worry Holly, you can always borrow from my closet – you and Ivy both.
Me: Boy is Mom gonna be surprised!
Finally, all the rehearsals were over and it was opening night. Along with our first week of shows came Lake Tahoe’s first heavy snowfall in seven years!
When I was out looking for props for the show, it occured to me that some falling snow would be appropriate for a Christmas show. It had been a long time since I’d seen much snow up here, and, as it was fairly inexpensive, I ordered a lot of it. What didn’t occur to me though was that Phil Randall, the show’s director, might be thinking along the same lines.
While I was ordering lots of snow for the show, Phil was incorporating ancient Eskimo snow dances into the show’s choreography (If you don’t belive in Eskimo snow dances, you’ve obviously never seen how much snow they get in Alaska). Fortunately, the roads were so bad after the first week of snow that the delivery trucks, carrying the rest of our order, couldn’t get through until shortly after Christmas. (Sorry, the name of the vendor who supplied the snow must remain a trade secret.)
When the show opened, I started into a whole new set of responsibilites. Every night, it was up to me to make sure that the stage had been swept and mopped; during the intermission I’d switch the sets between “Mary Christmas” and the vaudeville; and before the show, give the cast their calls at 30, 15, 10, 5, and 0 minutes before the curtain went up. Finally, I’d put on my Santa hat, go out to the D.J.’s booth, and run the lights during the show.
This was a lot more work than anything during the rehearsals had been – particularly during the show’s most climatic scene which had 6 lighting changes being done on two separate lighting boards with four of the changes taking place during the exchange of three lines (about 20-30 seconds). Talk about keeping busy!
Even though I was busier during the performances, in some ways, they were even more fun than the rehearsals. Among other things, I finally got to see the entire show, the whole way through, without any interruptions. And, during the last week or so, when there was singing and dancing up on the stage, a few people occasionally spotted someone up in the D.J.’s booth wearing a Santa hat dancing along with the actors.
The second most important thing I learned during the performances was that, when a ballet dancer performs a pirouette, it’s extremely rare for her to complete more than three full turns. The most important thing I learned was that, when it happens, noticing the fourth rotation will usually earn you a hug.
One of the best things about live theater is that no matter how many times you see the same show, even with the same cast, it will absolutely, positively never be the same twice. “Mary Christmas’ Carol” was no exception to this rule.
There was a large rubber spider which was only supposed to be a prop for the song “Nuttin’ for Christmas” in the vaudeville portion of the show (The piano player would toss it to the little boy who was being tormented by his three big sisters. He’d point to it, yell “SPIDER!”, and then scare them away with it). During the final week of performances, the spider became part of “Mary Christmas” too.
I don’t really know when or how it happened, but at some point a couple of us decided that instead of a watch dog (too expensive) Mary Christmas should have a “watch spider” guarding her office. Mary (Sue Dobson) was at first unaware of this and was thus taken by surprise one night when she opened her safe to get her money bags and found a large spider crouched on top of the pile. After that, “Hide the Spider” became a popular pasttime during the final 5 minutes before the curtain went up. Over the course of the final week, Sue found the spider in and on the filing cabinet, on top of the safe, on her desk, and once sitting on the back of her chair, waiting for her to sit down (I’ve heard that Leonard Nimoy had similar experiences with his bicycle during the filming of the original Star Trek TV series).
It doesn’t appear that I’m cut out to be an actor. I’m too self-concious and hate memorization. And since I’ve only worked on one show, my boss probably isn’t too worried about the possibility of my running off to work on any Broadway productions anytime soon (Besides, New York City is NUTS). Still, it looks as though I have found myself a fun hobby. Not bad for someone who graduated from High School with an absolute hatred of theater…. But then, that’s something to write about another time.