No wonder my cats hissed at me.

They probably don’t recognize me anymore.  This last week, because of the play, I’ve spent very little time awake at home.

11% of the last 4 days, according to my calculations.  A full 50% has been at school.  I’m glad it’s over, but I do love being a part of a big production like we had.

Yesterday was the final show.  Our auditorium holds about 850 people and the show was sold out at least a half hour before show time.  (850+ tickets @ $5 each, not a bad haul for a junior high production.  And that was only one of the 4 days.)

The show started about 15 minutes late, giving ticket holders that were late time to show up before we sold their seats to make room for the 100 or so people waiting and hoping for a seat.  Luckily we didn’t need to turn anyone away.  I had bought two tickets for friends, one of which cancelled and the other had taught at my first school with me, so I sold the two tickets (for face value, I wasn’t going to go scalping tickets at my own school) and invited my friend to watch the show from the sound booth with me.

The show went great.  As exhausted as the kids were from their schedule over the last week, they still showed a lot of energy.

I slept 10 hours last night, although my sleep was filled with songs from Grease.

Opening Night

Even though we’re already half way through our shows, tonight was really Opening Night, and we’ve got 3 more to go.

The first show was on Tuesday, for the feeder elementary schools.  This afternoon we had a show for our own student body.  Set the whole school off when Danny and SandraDee pulled a real kiss in the last act.  I don’t know if it was spontaneous or if the two had it planned beforehand, but it took everyone, including the drama teacher and the rest of the cast, by surprise.

Then tonight was the first show for the general public.  I got there 45 minutes before start time, and already the lobby was full of people waiting to be seated.

The play went off great, only a few minor glitches, which for a junior high production is perfection.

Exhausted.  Think I’ll go to bed.

Grease is the word, is the word…

At my first school the big thing was the dance concerts.  As the teacher in charge of the Stage Crew, it consumed three weeks of free time, twice a year.

At my new school it’s the annual musical.  And although I’m not in charge of stage crew, my principal found out we pulled off some amazing things with the lighting for those dance concerts, so I’m now the teacher in charge of the lighting for the musical.  Which is fine, since for the most part I’m having a good time with it.

The musical this year is “Grease”.  So far it hasn’t taken up as much of my free time as the dance concerts did, but so far this week I spent 1^st through 5^th period on Tuesday (they hired a substitute for me) and Friday’s Professional Development time working on the lights.  Yeah, technically that’s not free time, but yesterday the drama teacher and I stayed at school until 7:30pm working on the lights.  Today we ran through the play twice, I was there from 9:00am until 4:00pm.  And next week I’m going to be there from 7:00 to 9:00 for the three performances.

Today the parents got served the entire cast and crew lunch.  Hot dogs, chips, brownies and even some fruits and vegetables.  I had one of these irony moments when I realized I was in the cafeteria, doing lunch duty on a Saturday.  But all things considered, I do enjoy being a part of these productions.

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The light board is programmable, and the only backup media it can use is this:

Remember these?

Double-sided, double-density 1.44MB, 3½ inch floppy disk.  Notoriously unreliable, especially when the only ones you can find are quite old and quite used.  I decided that I needed to backup the file on something a little more trustworthy, since if I lost this information I would have to run the whole thing manually.  Possible, but very difficult and would require eliminating some of the more subtle, quick back and forth changes.

So I got out one of these,

with a USB adaptor and found a computer that had a floppy drive.

I looked at the two of them together,

and considered how far technology has come in the last 5 years or so.  5689.  That’s how many times more information that little black disk can hold than that big red one.