I joined RHSTC as a Freshman in high school and was still assisting a year after graduating high school. My theatre teacher, then Mrs. Walls and now Mrs. Knoblock, let me dabble and experiment with things that in hindsight I can’t believe she just let a freshman pull apart or attempt alone. I started as part of the set build and stage crew, but was quickly recruited to the audio team. My first production was running the mic table and mic changes—and there were many. From cleaning and trading sweaty mics, I continued helping with set builds and painting to prepare for shows, dabbled in stage combat, helped with lighting set up and spotlights, and then shifted to audio for rehearsals and onward. Over time I found myself a co-head of the audio team, operating a Soundcraft console, and calling audio and lighting cues for the booth.

I took theatre tech classes, independent study of theatre tech, and skipped to the advanced drama class when I won the Queen of Hearts role in Alice in Wonderland. After graduating, I was asked back to help train the freshman, oversee the fly crew, and provide general safety guidelines for a production of Beauty and the Beast (where I broke my hand to save someone from getting hit in the head by a flybar). I participated in 14 productions before graduating with honors in dramatics, including Anything Goes, The Outsiders, Into the Woods, High School Musical, and the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

During high school I got a job as a contract employee of the district to assist with guest events, dance recitals, and more. You would think I would have received it by being a part of the theatre company, but no. I just happened to meet my future employer at a shooting range while wearing a Romeo High School Theatre Company hoodie, and that’s how I got the job. Mr. George was a very stolid, curmudgeonly old man. You definitely knew which people were on his bad side—which seemed to be most people. I wasn’t on his “People he likes” list, which was really only his wife and his two dogs, but I think I fell into the tolerable category for him, which was a win with Mr. George. From him I learned to properly coil cables, old school theatrical lighting tricks, how not to get electrocuted on the school’s dinosaur of a patch bay that had broken plastic tabs that you pulled out and slid along a live wire to the correct number. I learned the proper ways to hang and fold cycloramas and backdrops, how to lay dance mats, and the wonders of finger-saving fireproof gloves.

The bulk of our work was done over the summer. We did some maintenance, I helped set up lighting, and then it was a lot of babysitting a couple of mics and hitting a play button. Mr. George would sit in the recliner in the back of the booth and read War and Peace. I still don’t know if it is such a big book that it took him three years to read, if he re-read it, or if he wanted to seem more impressive to us “kiddos”.

My lighting career really began when my church announced they were looking for someone who could run “fancy theater lights.” After a confused pause, I raised my hand. I had, after all, been in theatre. Maybe that qualifies as “fancy theater lights“? Mr. George had taught me some lighting things. When asked what my experience level was I mumbled some teenager nonsense about knowing how to change a lightbulb in ellipsoidal fixtures and having fancy fireproof gloves so I wouldn’t melt my fingers.

And that’s how I got tricked into waking up at 4:30 am to be set-up/tear-down crew and running lights for a church that went portable one month later.

For two years, we set up and tore down every Sunday at Eisenhower Performing Arts Center. I programmed and operated some truly terrible DJ software and eventually built a wee little team of teenagers that I taught and scheduled. A few months in, an usher overheard me singing while setting up screens in the lobby. The usher was also the Dad of the worship team lead, who didn’t ask but yelled across the auditorium that I would be auditioning for the band after service the next week.

From the end of my junior year in high school until our merger with Heritage Church, I did a lot of things. I was in the youth group, on their leadership team, a youth leader once I graduated, a lighting tech, and a singer/piano/bass player for Sunday services and for the youth band.

I joined Avon Player’s Theatre in Rochester after graduating high school. My theatre teacher, Mrs. Walls, referred me to them. I walked into the stage entrance and into a cloud of cigar smoke. A few of the staff that had been around forever were sitting in a semi-circle, smoking cigars, drinking beer, and discussing the previous show and the set up of the next one. It wasn’t what I expected. After a little culture shock, I settled in nicely. They were great people. They built off of my theatre education and I learned even more. I did several shows with them, including Young Frankenstein, Into the Woods, and The Sound of Music. I helped build, and paint, and prep. I learned a lot about props and budgets and clever theatre tricks. We even built a pool in the pit for one of our productions, which of course, started to leak eventually. And they also had an even older patch bay than Romeo did. It had numbered live 6” long pins with wires you moved from numbered socket to socket to patch correctly. No one had tried to untangle that mess of danger spaghetti and it was nearly impossible to use. After two stressful days of moving pins around, I got it untangled.

During a set build for Sound of Music I got conscripted into “just being a nun in two quick scenes“, because they were short on nuns. But then they were short on party guests, dancers, backup singers for VonTrapp children, stage hands, scene changes, and costume changes. Sound Of Music wins my award for craziest multi-role production.

I also ran tech for some of their guest rentals, including a rehearsal of one of Kensington’s plays.

I loved my time in that weird little A-frame theatre.

It

Discover Church merged with Heritage Church in 2011, and my family went with it. It was a weird point of integration. Everything I had been a part of before ended.