Last night the usual sus­pects went to a pro­duc­tion, and sat on the other side of the booth wall. Which was odd, but cool. My addi­tion to the wall was still sit­ting up there, keep­ing time nicely, which was pleas­ant to see… spec­u­la­tion con­tin­ues as to how long is shall remain, but you get that.

Actu­ally, a few more than the usual sus­pects — we were joined by Katyana, which was cool, and Sam also came to the party… it was like one big crazy fam­ily reunion! Our mis­sion, should we choose to accept it, was to stop our­selves from laugh­ing too hard before the pro­duc­tion com­menced. You have no idea how hard a task that is.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen scaf­fold­ing erected in such a man­ner, nor do I ever wish to again; it was good for a laugh once, maybe twice, but it’s all fun and games until a structurally-unsound-metal-thing-holding-up-little-people-comes-crashing-to-the-ground when the GAFFERS TAPE which is all that is hold­ing it together comes unfas­tened. I jest not. The scaf­fold­ing has dif­fer­ent length struts designed to hold it securely together, but appar­ently it was too much trou­ble for cer­tain peo­ple in the employ of SACS to find appro­pri­ate struts. I’ll leave it there. Actu­ally, no, I won’t, because it’s just too damn hilar­i­ous. To make mat­ters better/worse/more amus­ing, the kid oper­at­ing the spot didn’t actu­ally have a chair, and was sit­ting on the edge of this scaf­fold­ing sup­ported solely be Gaffer’s tape. I’m glad he wasn’t heavy, but at the same time, a mor­bid, evil, twisted part of me kept wish­ing that halfway through the per­for­mance there would come a scream and clat­ter­ing sound from the back of the room as this pre­car­i­ously con­structed.… thing… collapsed.

Oh, and if you’re won­der­ing about the title of this post, that’d be because this “White Shark” was invari­ably lit with a spot with a beam per­haps 1m at best, with a red gel frame HELD up to the light emit­ted from the spot. Why couldn’t they extend their hire bud­get far enough to get a nice-ish Sele­con 2.5k spot?! That’s like… $77 day rate from Lots Of Watts, which works out to be $154 for three days (don’t ask about the maths, their pric­ing is a bit odd like that), not fac­tor­ing what­ever dis­counts the school can pull with them! Seri­ously, that’s only 30-odd dona­tions… I have no idea what their num­bers were like for all shows, but it’s per­fectly man­age­able. That said, per­haps they should have just hired some damn fres­nels at $20 each or how­ever much they would be, instead of fill­ing the FOH bar up with non-safety-chained chrome Par 64’s!!! CHROME!!!! *shudder*

*ahem*

Yeaaah­h­hhh… so that was fun. The plot was decent, but it was dis­ap­point­ingly lack­ing in finesse… I’m won­der­ing if that’s because we were in the audi­ence and didn’t see it improve across per­for­mances and rehearsals, or whether it was just lack­ing, full stop. Not that it really mat­ters, see­ing the show is over now… but still, it felt so much more like a “dodgy school pro­duc­tion” than other things have. SACS seems big on that this year, what with their efforts so far; Show­case Con­cert, I’m glar­ing at you.

That fin­ished, we escaped deftly before some­one tried to con­script us to bump-out or some­thing else equally stu­pid, and went our var­i­ous ways. Ben and myself were forced into Katy’s car (hey, no com­plaints here!), Ben started mak­ing blonde dri­ver com­ments, and then… and then Katy missed a turn, and we ended up head­ing over Glebe Bridge (or the Anzac Bridge or what­ever it’s really called this week) by acci­dent. Oops! Hehehe. A quick phone call and three minute drive later, Dale had three strag­glers on his doorstep, ran­domly call­ing then drop­ping in at about 22:00 on a Sat­ur­day night.

Hey, I called first! Yeah. ’twas pretty cool. We took off about an hour later again, then drove ran­domly around, got invari­ably lost in the labyrinthine one-way streets of Rozelle/Balmain, before mak­ing it back via the city to mis­cel­la­neous places of res­i­dence. The magic had to stop some time ;)

Tags: Anzac Bridge, chair, FOH bar, Glebe Bridge, metal