let’s do this thing… (get the show on the road)

First Stop, Buffalo! We made it. We’re actually on the road now!

Thankfully, since we had to be out of our apartment by Sept 1, we were already mostly packed when we flew out on the 11th. We still took a lot of trips back and forth between the storage unit and spent too much time reorganizing and repacking our bags to make sure that we had everything we wanted to take with us and that the bags were under the weight limits! It’s a good thing we thought ahead and got Bryan a first-class seat because his ticket included overweight bags (it was also cheaper than an economy ticket plus bags, so…). We had some very heavy bags. Our heaviest was 63 lbs!  

We were a little nervous about fitting Bryan’s bike box into the cars to and from the airports, but we got it in no problem. Getting all the bags and the bike box out of the car and to the ticket counter was much more comical! Of course, I’m cheap and didn’t want to spring for a luggage cart. They were $6! That seemed like a lot to pay for such a short distance to travel from the curb to the check-in desk. It’s not like the carts at Aldi where you put a quarter in then get it back when you return the cart. Nope, they keep all $6. Thankfully a Delta employee saw us struggling—me with my carry-on, backpack, and 3 large suitcases and Bryan with his backpack and a bike box which he was using to push his carry-on—and helped us take our bags straight up to an open ticket agent.

After checking our bags, we headed to the one of the airport lounges which we have access to because of a travel credit card we got for touring and on the way we saw two delta employees carrying the bike box down some stairs and through a random hallway. Bryan wasn’t concerned at all. 😉 It didn’t really seem like a secure processes getting the bike to the plane, but it turns out that their normal route with the elevator was under construction. If you haven’t been to LGA in a while, it has been under construction for years and looks like it will be under construction for many years to come!

Anyways, I think I’m going to really like having airport lounge access, because, as we’ve established, I’m cheap and we got lunch and snacks in the lounge for free when the last time we were at LGA without the lounge access, we spent almost $20 on snacks to tide us over after our flight was delayed a couple hours. It will be nice during some of our longer layovers coming up.

The flight itself was a short and easy. I dozed off with all of my colleagues around. It’s a little weird to nap in front of your colleagues.

It was great to have them there once we got to Buffalo though. They helped us get all of our bags to the Car Pickup area. We waited a while for the car to arrive, and when it did, it passed the entrance to the pickup area and instead of going around, the driver just backed up the few hundred feet to try again. Thankfully, we arrived to the hotel without incident, but I was a little more pressed for time than we initially planned. I had just enough time to drop my bags off and change my shirt because I was really sweaty from carrying all those bags. 

After arriving at the theatre, I put up labeled arrows to help the cast and crew get around when rehearsals started the next day. I went around asking myself, “where do you belong?” Just kidding, really, I asked myself, “if I was an actor, would I be lost right now?” And put up arrows accordingly. It’s sort of a weird experience getting acquainted with the space that way the night before the first day of Tech. After hanging up the signage that night, I went back to the hotel and continued to work, preparing all of my paper work for the crew who will be working Stage Left with me. 

On Thursday morning, I went in, printed out my paper work, and gave it to the Head of Props, whom I had met in NYC, and the Head of Carpentry, whom I met for the first time at that moment, then got in touch with our Head of Wardrobe, whom I had also met already in NYC. We all thought we had lofty ambitions to Tech the first 30 minutes of Act One by the end of our 10 hour day. We ended up Teching 45 minutes! 

By the end of day on Friday, we were running Act One which is kind of absurd. Everyone backstage thought the director and creative team out in the house were going to stop more to work on lighting or move the cast around or something, but they didn’t stop, so we just kept going. There was no downtime. All of the departments were running at full speed. We joke about how Teching a show is like running a marathon, but this was like running the marathon at a sprint pace.

The pace didn’t let up on Saturday either. We were able to pretty much Tech all of Act Two in one day. 56 minutes of stage content Teched in less than 10 hours! We even ended the day a little early!!

I’m grateful that our hotel is just around the corner from the theatre, so my commute to and from work is only 5 minutes instead of 45 minutes like it was back in NYC. It gives me a little more time to sleep and at least 20 minutes to spend with Bryan while we eat breakfast each morning before I head back to the theatre around 8:30 or 9:00am.

It should slow down once performances start next week!

Until then,

e