Missing the War

It's 3:13am and I'm trying to make some extra money. No, I'm not whoring myself around the streets of NYC, not exactly. I am sitting in an expensively decorated room adjacent to the ballroom at 55 Wall Street. Right now, in the huge room next to me, riggers are putting together 51 16'X4' panels of mirrored mylar ceiling, rigging them to a truss and flying them 28 feet in the air. It's all part of the Adidas Y3 fashion show which is taking place sometime next few days during Fashion Week. I'm told that the show, which will last no longer than 20 minutes, will cost approximately 1 million dollars.

I used to do this shit all the time. Well, not Fashion exactly. (Although I did drive a lighting designer around NYC for one fashion week. He had a brand new BMW which he actually let me drive through rush hour traffic, all the time telling me to drive faster and cut off taxis. One day, I had over 8 hours of spare time with the car and I drove around and around, eventually picking up some dudes trying to hail a cab and only charging them 10 bucks to take them to a bar on the West Side. But that's a whole different bucket of chicken.) I used to be a stage manager, you know, for theater. Actually, I was more often an assistant stage manager. My stage manager was a great lady by the name of, what should I call her? I'll call her Raemo. She'll love that.

Raemo called me on Monday and asked me to come in tonight ostensibly so she could get some sleep. I got here at 10:45pm. She didn't leave until 2am. We got to sit in the "production office" and shoot the shit for a few hours. Mostly, I was listening to random war stories about what had gone wrong that day at "The Tent" in Bryant Park. I missed stuff like this. Sitting around, jabbering about how people are idiots and how no matter how much you plan something always goes wrong. I missed hanging out with Raemo and makingher laugh.

Then thirty minutes pass and we're still talking about the same thing. Then an hour. Pretty soon, I remembered what I hate about production. Everyone wants to talk talk talk. If there's a problem, we need to everybody to give their opinion from the Production manager down to the measly rigger. There's way too much talking, way too much discussion without anyone making a decision. I would love to be the guy to step up, but hey, i'm just subbing tonight.

It's 5am now. Everyone has left the building except for Glen, the rigger who is in that huge room playing with motors and moving tons of weight with the push of a button. I had big plans for this blog but to be honest, I'm just fucking tired. I'm going to ctach some winks until Raemo comes to releive and give me my fucking 16 bucks an hour.