(14) Back to Work

Monday, October 20th: I went into work at the Kennedy Center this morning. It was a little funny to be back after only being on the road for 2 weeks but it gave me some good desk time to get work done. I left early in the afternoon and took the metro out to the West Falls Station and then took a taxi to the hotel we were staying at. In McLean, we stayed at a Westin. It was REALLY nice! The vans and truck showed up shortly after I got there. That evening we had a load in at The Alden Theatre. They are a test facility for JR Clancy Rigging, which is one of the largest theatrical rigging companies in the country. This means that they have a lot of high end equipment including automated linesets. Instead of a stagehand pulling a rope to move the flying pieces, each lineset has a motor that runs the flying pieces. The load in went well with only one major bump. We were unable to hang our largest and most exciting piece because we didn’t have enough room in the theatre. We were about ½ way done hanging it when we figured out that the rest of the piece wouldn’t fit. Luckily we have a painted drop(which is much smaller) that we can hang in place of our larger piece. This was also the first time that we had a chance to use our painted drop since we just received it in the mail that day! The stage at The Alden is significantly smaller than at any other theatre that we have been too. Caroline and I talked through a number of changes that would need to happen with the flow of the show because of the difficulty of the space.

Tuesday, October 21st: We had 1 show at 10:00am(15). The Alden Theater is part of the McLean Community Center which is funded by the residents of McLean. McLean is very close to the CIA Langley Headquarters so the people living around there are mostly government employees in high level positions. We had a fantastic hospitality spread and they also gave us sandwiches for lunch after the show was over. It was by far the best hospitality we’ve had on the road. The Tech Crew had a meeting with David Paige and David Kilpatrick who had seen the show that morning. We talked about the good and bad things that had happened on the road. We had the rest of the afternoon off which I used to do more desk work. That night, I went to do my laundry and stopped by a Barnes & Nobles.