(51) Avon, Co

Friday, March 20th: I was up at 4:45am for our 6:00am load in. I had breakfast in my room and went downstairs around 5:20am. We left the hotel around 5:30am and drove up the hill in the pitch black to the venue, which is part of the Beaver Creek Ski Resort. When we arrived, we walked through the loading dock and down 4 flights of stairs to the stage level. The theater is literally inside the mountain! We then took the elevator back upstairs and started to unload the truck. Most of the pieces were taken down in the elevator but some of the pieces had to be lowered by chain motor which took some time. We quickly learned that most of the stage helping us today were foreigners who work around the Ski Resorts. Apparently, these ski resorts(we are about 15 minutes from Vail) are world renouned and people come from all over the world to work and live here. Most of the people who work at the hotels, restaurants and shops are also foreigners. They were a good group of guys and the fact that English was not their first language didn’t hinder the process at all. Most of them spoke Spanish and I had fun listening to them and trying to figure out what they were saying to each other. We also had way more people than normal so things went very quickly for me once all the scenery was inside. On the stage, they have oxygen tanks incase the performers are having trouble with the lack of oxygen. Joan Baez had a concert there the night before and had to come off four times to get oxygen. The stage is at around 8000 ft elevation. Caroline, Jill and I had a long discussion about where the two oxygen tanks needed to be during which parts of the show. We were most concerned with Dave and Margo because they are running around for most of the show. Caroline and Jill left and I went back out to do some more set up. Around 9:40am, I realized that Rudy was still work and he was suppose to be on a break. I went back to the booth to see if he was close to being done, but he was having a lot of problems and was in the process of testing out all of the house wireless equipment. I went to call Caroline to see if she could pick Rudy up some food but they were already back. So we decided that when Eric and I went on break we’d pick up something for Rudy. I went back onstage to see how Eric was doing. I told him we had about 40 minutes and he looked at me funny. He said “Don’t we have until 11:00am?” I said “No, 10:30am is sound check.” At that point I knew that none of us would be getting a break before the first show. I continued running around trying to get things set up for the show. The performers showed up around 10:30am for mic check and Rudy had just finished getting the whole system to work. Eric was just starting to work on cues for the show which is normally something that he’s done with at this point. We also learned that Margo, who did not travel with us to Avon, was very sick. She had flown in the night before and had a stuffy nose and couldn’t pop her ears. She was having trouble breathing because she was sick and even more so because of the altitude. We finished up sound check and presets with about 30 minutes to spare before the show started. 5 ½ hours after we started we got a brief 30 minute break before the 12:00noon(87). The show started off fine. Jill and I had a number of confusing moments where we were trying to figure out what our next cue was and where the oxygen tanks needed to be. At one point, I forgot a cue and had to move the pieces late. At one point we had to force Carolyn to take some oxygen because we were worried that she was going to pass out onstage. She said she didn’t want any cause it scared her. Jill demanded she take some I told her it’s not pure oxygen, put the mask on her face and told her to breathe normally. We paid extra special attention to Margo and gave her oxygen every single time she left the stage. The show ended with no other major problems, we reset for the night show and headed back to the hotel by 1:30pm. I got Chinese for lunch, made a bunch of phone calls and did some paperwork. I took a short nap while watching some NCAA Basketball tournament games and then got a light dinner from the deli across the street. The company loaded back into the vans around 5:15 and headed back to the venue for a short sound check and a show at 6:30pm(88). This show went much better except for our general confusion. Because we had walked away from the show after the first one, we hadn’t completely processed the changes we had made for this venue! This meant that Jill and I were constantly looking at one another for the answer to what we should be doing next. The show ended and we started load out. Everything went very well because we had a huge crew and it was all of the same people from the morning. We drove back down the mountain and were back at the hotel around 10:00pm successfully ending our 14 hour day.