The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(3)
Low on the totem pole again, he was enrolled in Stagecraft 100, Professor Leo Graham’s required introductory course. Leo was a paradox: while he looked and acted like a stoner—some swore he was Jerry Garcia’s twin brother—he ran his shop and his productions with almost military zeal. He was laconic and laid-back, rarely raising his voice unless he was directing someone in the catwalk, yet his soft-spoken words were law. He built manpower from the bottom up and let knowledge cascade from the top down. He shepherded his students through a four-year program that took them from servitude to artist. Freshmen toiled for him, their resentment quickly turning to respect. Sophomores would follow him anywhere. Juniors revered him. Seniors would kill for him.
Erik loved his classwork in the subterranean shops in the basements of Mallory Hall. The first half of the semester he had built sets for the one-act plays in the black box theater. Leo believed in a small task force—you worked harder, but you learned faster. Erik and three other underclassmen took direction from two seniors, for whom the one-acts were a last hurrah, their graduating project. Leo provided guidance from a distance and divine intervention when necessary. Subjects of this unholy trinity, Erik and his mates worked like sled dogs, soon with Erik as their unspoken lead musher. A wartime camaraderie in the warm, windowless shops beneath Mallory. Long hours of philosophical conversation as they painted sets and backdrops. Raucous bonding as they hammered and sawed. And punchy horseplay while sinking countless numbers of screws into crossbeams and struts. Erik drove one comrade to the campus health center for stitches after a slight mishap with the power saw, and another who tripped over a poorly-taped lighting cable and broke his wrist.
When performance week arrived, the sets were brought to the black box via the service elevator. Load-in started at seven in the morning with coffee and bagels, and went into the wee hours with pizza and beers. In the wee-est of those hours, a red-haired ingénue lured Erik into one of the dressing rooms and showed him the meaning of “casting couch.” She never called afterward.
He never had so much fun in his life.
Now, on a Sunday in November, he walked into the vast main auditorium of Mallory Hall, taking on his second assignment for the semester: running lights for the conservatory’s fall dance concert.
He wasn’t sure what to expect. Leo had said the dance division of the conservatory was one of the top programs on the East Coast, but Erik had no frame of reference. Other than musical theater numbers, dance was utterly foreign to him, though he had enough brains to figure out “Born to Hand Jive” from Grease was decidedly not what was going down today.
Nice scenery here, however, especially if one was a leg man. He moved aside as a trio of girls in leotards chattered their way up the aisle. They smiled at him in passing, six eyes sweeping him head to toe in a frank once-over. He smiled back, resisting the urge to turn and keep checking them out.
Erik was definitely a leg man.
He looked for Leo, and found him coiling cables at the side of the stage with a dark-haired boy in a flannel button-down shirt. Leo tossed Erik a hank of cable without preamble and made introductions. “This is David Alto, he’ll be running lights for the concert, consider him the sorcerer. David, this is Erik. Consider him the apprentice. Finish these up and take him back in the booth, show him the boards. You got about twenty minutes before the madness.”
David and Erik shook hands and after dealing with the cables, headed back up the aisle to the glassed-in booth at the back of the auditorium. It was four feet wide by eight feet long, with lighting consoles along two-thirds of the raised counter. Two captains’ chairs sat before the consoles, each with a headset hooked over one arm. Clipboards holding design schematics and cue sheets hung neatly. Mason jars of pencils, all sharpened, perched on the counter. Wires and cables, neatly taped, snaked overhead and underfoot, turning precise corners around and through things.
It was a tighter, cleaner ship than Erik had been on in high school. Clearly childish things had been put away and no one would be getting laid here. Still, a little quake of excitement touched the back of his neck and he took a pencil, spun it through his fingers as David gave him the short tour.
“Equipment’s kind of kludgy. You work boards like these before?”
“Looks sort of the same. You write out the cue sheets or is it computerized?”
“Nothing in this place is computerized, but they’re going to bat for us in the next budget, I hear. I worked a sweet system at SUNY Purchase over the summer, all computers. Coming back here is like working with candles.”
Through the glass booth Erik watched Leo Graham direct a band of techs in bringing out the boom stands—long poles with crossbars, to be hung with fixtures and set in each of the stage’s four wings. “I’ve never rigged booms.”
“Booms are key when you’re lighting dance. In fact if it came down to a choice between four lanterns on booms and forty overhead, Leo would take the four on booms.”
“Really?”
“The booms are the bitches, my friend,” David said. “It’s one of the sayings around here.”
“Does Leo use any overhead lighting?”
“Sure.”
“How many bars?”
“Just two. We get to the downstage one with a cherry picker, and there’s a catwalk upstage. I’ll show you later. You access the house lanterns from the balcony. It’s a little hairy up in the ceiling, do you mind heights?”