Well, that’s another tour. And it seems I have a problem.
I get severely stressed when things don’t go right. The tour manager refers to me as “a little jumpy”. Heh.
I don’t remember this really being an issue before. Maybe I’ve only recently become aware of how fast things start to bug me. I’ve noticed that I tend to attribute mistakes to malice, and things I can’t control upset me. Trim heights that are too low are a perfect example.
We had one of these on our last show – my rear truss is meant to be flown at around 20 feet high, and it looks a bit silly if it isn’t. Normally, this hasn’t bothered me too much. The bendy trusses that we hang off the upstage truss are, well, bendy, and they can bend pretty far (looking sillier and sillier – to ME, anyway) before they’re at a point where they’re, er…pointless. Anyway, this particular venue had a ceiling so low I could only take my rear truss up to about 13 feet, and this was making me rather angry. This stupid ceiling was ruining my day. Now I had to climb the Genie Towers, crawl across the truss, move a moving light to a new position in the air by myself, the whole setup looked ridiculous, ARRGGHH!
And suddenly, after huffing and puffing around for a bit, slamming a few road cases, and generally making a fool of myself, I realized I was getting upset for no reason. There was nothing I could do about the trim height, and I know from past experience that nobody in the audience knows what my setup is supposed to look like, and also nobody cares about my rockin’ light show and perfectly-chosen colors.
And it suddenly seemed so silly to be so uptight about the height of the ceiling. And I realized that I’ve done this a few other times on tour. Once, the sound guys took the front truss up before I could put my Soco cables on it, and I had to take extra time to put them up. I attributed this to malice, when in fact it was just a simple oversight. Another time, I got angry when a trunk that I needed to pack my stuff in got rolled out before I could put some of my lights away – this too, I attributed to somebody trying to pull one over on me, when in fact it was just another simple mistake. Maybe it’s a bit of an occupational hazard – we production people rely so much on schedules and routines that it’s sort of ingrained behavior to get annoyed when the game plan changes.
All this to say – I need to learn the calm the heck down. Learn to realize when I’m getting stressed, and let it just go. This would be easier if I had a little gizmo that would beep at me when I’m getting too worked up about something. The difficulty in learning to not be stressed about things is that at the time, your response to the situation feels perfectly reasonable. Greater self-awareness is required, I suppose.
Other than a few times of uber-craziness, the tour went pretty well. I saw lots of Renkus-Heinz boxes at Baptist churches, taught lots of people how to roll cables over-under, and ate a lot of pizza. I’m currently working on set designs for the next tour, and considering taking a cue from the band’s drummer and sending out lighting design samples to prospective clients.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks