Everything's Coming Up Rosie's!

Greetings, gentle readers. I am back where it all began today--yep, you guessed it. Boston! We drove here this morning from our provisional stop in Rhode Island (The OCEAN State!) where we had bunkered for one night in order to save money on hotel rooms. I feel a little uneasy about working for a company where that amount of money is of enough concern to make them change routes. Ah well, as long as the checks clear, that's all that matters. We had an interesting day yesterday, and by interesting, I mean hellish. We performed in Englewood, NJ, which is in no way as attractive as its name may lead you to believe. But the theatre we were in had a loading dock and was very pretty on the inside. Precious little wingspace, but that's such a norm at this point that it barely bears mentioning. The most interesting part of the theatrical experience was the crew. I want you to close your eyes and picture in your mind the most clichéd, stereotypical New Jersey stagehand you can think of. Get that image solidified in your consciousness. Got him? The ridiculous accent, the tattoos, the out of control facial hair, the attitude? Got it? Good. Now add a few zeroes to the end of that and you've got a rough idea of what our crew was like yesterday. I swear to god these people came out of Central Casting. I was not surprised in any way to find out that they all owned motorcycles, and made most of their money working rock concerts that came through town. Oh, and one of them, the most New Jersey-y of them all (who was named Mace, by the by. No, I shit you not. Mace. As in the blunt instrument. Though it may be a nickname derived from what he is fended off with most) plays in a death-metal band. I was unaware death-metal still existed. You would think that it was a genre of music which, by definition, would have a very short lifespan. 

The joy began at load-in, when the crew (who, I will admit were very jovial with Schneider and myself.) decided that we were unloading the truck a little too slowly. This happened right near the end, so I'm not sure why the patience had run out, and Mace ran onto the truck and tried to help Schneider pull something down off of something else. He was going too fast and for all intents and purposes dropped his side of it, then berated Schneider for not waiting until he was ready, which caused Schneider (whose mellowness has been sorely tested by Levitt) to snap back at him. This got things off to a wonderful start. It also pissed me off because I was standing right there and if Mace had simply waited five seconds, I would've been available to lower the case myself. But like I said, these guys were the archetypal Jersey stagehands, and they were out to prove that nothing could possibly be beyond them. Oy. But wait, send no money now, there's more! Once we got everything in, it became very apparent during the setup that our crew did not like Levitt. To be fair, it was also apparent that she had little to no use for them as well, since she didn't even attempt to start out being polite to them, but instead went straight into bossy bitch mode. I didn't think it was physically possible, but these guys' backs got even further up than they were at the beginning, so the entire setup process was fraught with tension and barely restrained hostility. Nothing like that to start off a morning. Whee!!!! And naturally this tension spilled over onto us. Not, amazingly from the crew, who were very nice to all of us. Mace and Ted got into a deep discussion of punk rock music once Ted admitted to having seen Iggy Pop live. This made him a bosom comrade to Mace, so that went well. And the other guys all seemed to get along with us pretty well. Most of them were really helpful and joking with us. (This was apparently in between muttering about how they'd like to slit Levitt's throat.) So as far as the New Jersey IATSE was concerned, we were cool. Levitt, on the other hand, since she couldn't tear into her crew the way she so dearly wanted to, tore into us instead. Especially poor Ted. Flo had to set up her sound rack onstage in this venue, instead of being out in the house, so she needed someone to go out into the house as she ran mic check in order to set levels. So Levitt went out in the house, and since Carol was off doing other things and unavailable,(She usually helps with mic check) Flo asked Ted to do it, who had done it for her before. So he starts and without missing a beat, Levitt starts yelling at him that he had to speak his lines and only his lines to do mic check, then to walk back and forth, which was different from the way he had done it before. Ted flusters easily. So once he gets flustered, his lines escape him and he starts stammering and looking like he doesn't know what's going on. This of course increases Levitt's ire and she starts yelling at him again to make sure he faces the mics. Poor Flo and I are looking at Ted, wishing we could somehow yank him out of there with a huge hook. We did feed him some lines, so he got himself back on track, but we all felt like the whole place was a powder keg with a very short fuse being threatened by a match held in a shaky hand. Then, as we were starting the show, I discovered, as I was getting ted into the bed for Tell-Tale, that the bed had not been placed on it's stoppers, so it was rolling free. This is a problem mainly because he's got to fall off it to the floor when I "hit" him with the lantern, and it's really important the bed is stable. Now, I usually place the stoppers, but lately (since her finger stopped being broken) Levitt has told me she'll place the bed since she doesn't like it being placed before she focuses the front of house lights and by then I am usually upstairs getting ready. So I went ahead and didn't even try to set the bed. I usually double check it when I come downstairs to have a special focused on me, but this particular time I didn't. So I guess it comes down to me not distrusting her enough. Thankfully Ted was able to fall out of the bed without any mishaps, but the bed started rolling immediately when he tried to get under it after I kill him, which messes up the illusion and is another time it's not the safest to be unstable. This raised my anger, since I remember her sweeping down on Ted earlier about making sure I was safe, and part of me wanted to accost her at intermission and yell, "That was SO dangerous. This cannot happen!" But I am a nice guy, and I didn't. Nothing came of it, so we dodged a bullet, and I will always double check it.

Then there was load-out. We were moving along, and speeding along due to the fact that we had the uber-crew anxious to get us out of the theatre so they could head off to whatever they were going to do next. I'm used to that, and I figured things would go swifter than usual. I was right, and the crew, once it looked like most of the big stuff had been taken apart, started asking if we could "start moving somma dis shit out." Now, most of the boxes weren't fully packed up yet, lights, sound, costumes and props weren't fully finished, and since I'm one half of the truck pack crew, it would be kind of hard to start packing the truck without me. I was trusting in Levitt's natural state of combativeness to come out and tell them not yet, or at the very least, to ask Schneider and me if we were ready to get on the truck. That's what I get for counting on her. She gives the green light and starts calling for things to go on the truck--most of which weren't packed up yet, so now everyone's running around trying to get this stuff done at like triple speed because she's getting impatient for things to get on the truck because the crew is getting impatient and taking things out of order. So I rush finishing up, grab my stuff and run out to the truck, to find that a bunch of stuff has been packed. And there's a large amount of equipment on the dock, out of order, with people walking around asking what's next and where's this where's that? Can I bring this on? No, because we don't have this stuff. Where's that? I don't know, ask Levitt. Once I get on the truck, Schneider and I get a handle on most of it, but we constantly have to hold these guys back from getting on the truck with things that are way down the list. Nothing pisses me off more than this, and it pissed me off when I called the pack last tour, because it leads to the whole thing taking longer than it would if they just slowed down and listened to me. It was hard enough for me to control the crews when I called it since I didn't have any real status with the company, but Levitt's a production (not JUST stage) manager, so she should be able to at least get them to grab things in the right order. But considering I've still got to tell her what that order is half the time, I guess I can understand how that would be difficult. Oy. So by the time we finished, all I wanted to do was get the hell out of there. Bob was suffering from some migraine pain, so Levitt took him out of the truck and replaced him with herself. Which was hilarious, since Schneider was driving the truck, and the two of them do NOT get along. And that led to the other hellish part of the day.

The rest of us drove on to lovely Warwick, RI, which went blessedly uneventfully. But when we reached the hotel we discovered that a) they only had three rooms for us and b) Levitt and Schneider had been pulled over. The room problem was soon fixed when we discovered that (for some strange Chamber reason) the fourth room had been put under Flo's name. When Levitt and Schneider got back, we discovered they had been pulled over and Schneider's driver's log wasn't up to date, so he got hit with a fine, and the cop somehow lost his driver's license while writing him up at the weigh station. So what does this mean, gentle readers? It means that our pool of drivers for the truck has dwindled to just four, and Bob, while able to drive the truck, doesn't like driving it on anything but long open stretches. Ted is able to drive the truck, but has no confidence in being able to do it, and to be honest, none of us feel comfortable with it either. So for the majority of the time, we're talking Levitt, Flo and me. Yep, it just gets better and better. Thankfully, we found a bar in RI that had karaoke, so Flo and I (the rest of the group were either sleeping or huddling in their rooms, afeared of fate, I trust.) headed out to Rosie's lounge. Rosie herself was there waiting tables and pouring drinks. Thank goodness she was, because the guy she had behind the bar helping her was so useless, all he was able to do was pour a Diet Coke for Lenten Flo. My Jameson, neat, was beyond his abilities. He actually told me he was going to wait for Rosie to get back behind the bar because he was only a bartender "up to a pernt" and he didn't want to mess up my drink. Yep, pouring whiskey into a glass is a tricky proposition indeed. Rosie herself poured what my friend Naomi would've called a "boatload" of alcohol adn she became my favorite person in the world. I learned a Rhode Island delicacy called "stuffies" which are breaded strips of something called quahogs, which are, according to Rosie (a rotund woman with an attitude somewhere in the "slap you on the back and ask how it's hangin'" school) "sometin' like ersters." I truly loved the Rhode Island dialect, especially how all the r's are soft v's. As in "We don't have no cheese no more fer the cheese plate, but we'll have it again tomovveh." The karaoke was run by a couple who gave "casual" a new definition. She was a girl who sang in such a way as to make you long for the dulcet tones of that Hung guy from American Idol a few years back. I swear to god she couldn't find the right key with a map, a flashlight, and two Sherpas. He was a large man in a sleeveless T-Shirt, camo pants, and the kind of beard usually seen after hearing the sentence, "Will the defendant please rise?" He sang alright, mostly because he stuck to deep-voiced country songs about trucks and women's asses. (Not necessarily in that order) The crowd consisted of about ten people, all of whom made the two running the karaoke look like fashion plates AND sound like Julie Andrews and Caruso. There was one small man who looked like Motel the Tailor who insisted on singing despite the fact his voice wasn't suited to anything but silence. In short, it was the perfect karaoke crowd. Flo and I did sing, with the bearded guy threatening to throw his panties onstage when i sang Tom Jones. Yep, we were in our element. Thankfully, he kept his pants where they belonged, and I ended the evening with an extended live version of "Friends in Low Places" (Hey, I cater to my audience.) Trust me on this--you can definitely have enough of that song. But as we were waiting for our check, the useless guy behind the bar comes up, sits down next to me and starts telling me how the crowd on Thursday night is far better for karaoke and how they got some kid who works over at the CVS who brings in a bunch of people and does crazy stunts with gals and everything, and I really should how up then because I'd fit in great with them and if I wanted them to get into it they'd be into it and goin' nuts. I informed him that was great but we were leaving town the next day, but I'd hang out at Rosie's anytime I was in Rhode Island. He thanked me and went back behind the bar. I have yet to figure out what the hell that was about. It was like he was offering me a job, except the kind with no pay and no benefits. So we paid up and left. But I shall always remember Rosie's. Apparently, if I go back there on a Thursday, I can count on the no-collar Rhode Island vote for my run at the White House. Pond in 2012--He's REALLY Got Friends In Low Places!