Welcome to My Nightmare

I was working at a now defunct lighting company in California, and we had a tradeshow exhibit for a trucking show at the Louisville Convention center. I was in New Orleans finishing up a show at the time, so I missed watching the shop fill the order and ship it out. I flew directly from New Orleans into Louisville, expecting a typical tradeshow load-in. Hardly.

Years ago, I was on tour with an extremely successful rock band from the ‘70s and early ‘80s. After they had been off the road for some time, they resumed touring, claiming that it would be their “farewell tour.” (They had previously made the claim at least three times.) After four or five shows into their stadium tour, they and their management decided, at the last minute, to do a production videotape of their show, without filling the crew in on all of the details.

In 1973, a gig at the Pocono State Fair in Pennsylvania offered a regional lighting company a wonderful summer break from daily four-hour load-ins and load-outs and endless driving. It was like a paid vacation. What could be better than a week of easy work and an eclectic mix of great acts from Bob Hope and Sammy Davis, Jr. to rock and even The Jackson Five?

It was a day just like any other Texas day  at the Cotton Bowl: hot and humid. A crew from Showlites was making steady progress, and we were well ahead of schedule that day, putting up a fairly decent-sized lighting rig for a Journey show that was about to be unleashed upon unsuspecting Dallas residents that weekend. The rig was a 400-plus lamp system, not including audience lights and the Molefays that were to be used on the P.A. wings to light two enormous scrims on either side of the screens used for Eidophore (large scale) projections.

As one of the spot ops for Disney on Ice’s Monsters Inc., one of my main objectives is to hit every cue. But no matter how you try or how well you plan, there are times when forces beyond your control conspire against you. Take, for example, the time I was working spotlight number in section 209. I was sitting in a seat behind the spotlight when I reached up to strike the lamp. I tilted the light back so that I could reach the button, as I have done hundreds of times before. All of a sudden the back leg of the spotlight flew up and in the air, and the entire spotlight, all 106 pounds of it, came crashing down on me, pinning me between the seat and the light.

In 1988, I had the chance to go to Cascais, Portugal, on my 29th birthday no less, with a group for which I was LD’ing. I should have known when the airline lost all of my luggage that I was in for a bad trip.

The show was to be broadcast “live” on Portuguese national radio. When I showed up to focus and program, I discovered the lighting rig was only half set up, and there were no local lighting personnel anywhere in the building. As I walked around checking out the rig, I also noticed that the power to the dimmers was not connected properly. I found this out the hard way when I got a nice electrical jolt to my left hand. When the crew finally did show up two hours later, the first thing I did was to let the head electrician know of the problem. He informed me that I was completely wrong and he refused to double-check his work.