(48) Hell Week

Sunday, March 8^th: SPRING FORWARD! This morning was the time change and a 7:00am load in. I was very concerned about my alarms going off at the right time so I set them all for an hour earlier in case they didn’t change. My phone ended up waking me up at 4:45am because it had sprung forward. I tried to go back to sleep but it didn’t really happen. I was a little on edge that morning and when I didn’t see Eric at 6:00am in the breakfast room I called him thinking that his alarm didn’t go off. He was awake and I later found out that he didn’t know that we could get breakfast that early. We had our load in, which was ok and went pretty quickly. The cast showed up at 12:30pm for mic check and we had a show at 2:00pm(76). I was hoping to have a nice relaxing afternoon and evening but instead I ended up running around even more. I went to Walmart for errands then I went to the grocery with Dave and finally to the Laundromat with Lindsay. It was pretty exhausting and very time consuming.

Monday, March 9^th: We had a 10:00am(77) and 12:00noon(78) show in Everett and then load out. I didn’t get much sleep last night, and because the time change the night before, I was not in the best of moods. We drove 37 miles (13,069 total miles) to Bellevue, WA, had about an hour to spare and then drove over to the Meydenbauer for a load in. I didn’t even take the time to go up to my room. Instead I sat in the lobby and ate my dinner. There was some question as to whether we were using the drop or the truss in this venue and the presenter was pushing me really hard to use the drop. I think this was mostly because it would go faster and she would cut down on her labor costs. She was also talking to my crew about it which was very frustrating because some of them were questioning me about it as well. I’m paid to produce the same show in every venue and it’s not the show that contains the drop. It was very frustrating not to have the support from my crew. I ended up using the drop because of Union questions and push from the presenter. Caroline and Jill were going to run errands during load in so I hopped on and went o Home Depot to pick up some supplies. One of the casters on the bed had come off and I needed to get some wood glue to put it back together. I had some extra time before they were coming back to pick me up from Home Depot so I walked across the parking lot to Best Buy and looked at digital SLR cameras, digital video cameras and cell phones. Load in finished just on time and we headed back to the hotel.

Tuesday, March 10^th: We had a 10:00am(79) and 12:00noon(80) shows and then load out immediately following. I slept much better last night so I felt a little better today. After load out, we drove 39 miles (13,108 total miles) down to Tacoma, WA. Today I had enough time to go to my room, eat dinner and relax for about 10 minutes before leaving for the venue. This venue was interesting because they didn’t want to bring in people to unload the truck with us and the local crew wouldn’t get in the truck to help. It was pretty fast to get everything out of the truck, but it was obvious that this crew was not the fastest we’d worked with. The head carpenter was looked familiar and after talking to him a bit, I realized that he had worked on “The Ring Cycle” at Seattle Opera when I did my internship there. We put up the scenery with no problems but were a little slower than normal. Most of the tech crew were pretty exhausted at this point because it was our 3^rd venue in three days. I, on the other hand, was feeling really good about everything and felt like my head was finally clearing from the lack of sleep and overworked week. I could see the end of one of the longest weeks of this tour.