gentle readers, allow me to take a break from all the renovation posts in order to share with you my first theatrical work. previously thought lost to the world (also, forgotten), it was recently unearthed by my mother. currently scholarly thinking supports the notion that i was 9 years old at the time of writing and that it premiered at a girl scouts international event. sadly, it closed on the same day it opened.

Tonight we hosted a memorial at my theatre for our Master Electrician who passed away two weeks ago. Another one of my staffers and I planned most of the event. But when it came to executing it, more than a dozen people stepped up to help with food and drink, to speak, or sing or program the lights or sort photos or clean the theatre or track down videos or loan equipment. And, in case you didn’t know, theatre people like to mourn in dramatic ways. There were readings from Beckett and Thorton Wilder. There was contemporary poetry. There were knock knock jokes, blues and folk music, a multimedia slide show, and a 21 light salute. This morning while getting dressed Ben asked me, “this isn’t the sort of memorial where I need to wear black, is it?” and I replied, “No. Or if it is, I’d better cancel the circus act.” True story.

Toward the end of the evening I’d scheduled a section of time where the MC invited anyone in the audience who wanted to speak to come up and share a memory, a story, anything. I wasn’t sure if this would be a good idea or a total flop. It went on for more than an hour. There were laughter and tears and impressions and life lessons.

Now, I can plan the hell out of an event, but I can’t speak in public for shit. As the open mic section went on, my heart pounded as I even considered going up to say something (or maybe it was the fact that I’d skipped dinner and only consumed whiskey before the event started. Hard to say). Perhaps if I’d had a scrap of paper and could have made some notes, I might have done it. I regret being such a wuss. But I’m a writer, not a speaker. So, I came home and transcribed what I would have said had I managed to get up and speak:

Hi I’m J, I’m the production manager here at the theatre. I wasn’t going to speak tonight because public speaking terrifies me, but then I thought about how Brenton was afraid of nothing, or rather, he never let fear get in the way of doing anything he wanted to do.

I was Brenton’s supervisor here. Being a manager is a little like being a parent. You’re a parent, and a cheerleader and a team member and a confidant and a friend and a sibling and a coworker, all at once.

Brenton and I started in our respective positions at Court at the same time, two years ago. One of the great rewards of being Brenton’s manager was that I had the opportunity over the past two years to watch him grow from an electrician into the Master Electrician. He went from being a technician to being a manager in his own right. It was such a pleasure to watch him grow and stretch into those new challenges.

The thing about being the production department mom is that, just like an actual mom, there were things about Brenton’s life that he didn’t share with me. So it was only in the past two weeks that I got to know so many other parts of Brenton’s life – his parents Debi and Hugh, his partner Lexi, his circus friends, the folks at the Chicago Folk Festival, his climbing friends. So many overlapping circles.

Several people mentioned that Brenton used to practice his circus routines in the theatre in spite of the risk of being fired over it. I was the person who threatened to fire him. And you know what? It made no difference. Brenton was fearless, and he loved being in the air more than anything. I’m an endurance athlete, and so was Brenton. He got interested in running one day, asked me a few questions about it, and then went out and ran the 16 miles from his house to the theatre later that week. (For those of you who aren’t runners, that’s crazy town. it could take a normal person a year, or more to train up to running 16 miles for the first time). Brenton never let anything stand in his way. He was one of those people who didn’t wait around for someone else to be interested in what he was interested in. He found something he wanted to pursue, and he was off and running, exploring that thing. And while Brenton and I had a compartmentalized relationship, I sensed a kindred spirit in him in that regard. Moving through life this way can be very lonely, but it can be incredibly rewarding as well.

Tonight, as I look around at all of the people who are here from all of the part of Brenton’s life, I can see that, while he moved through life with a voracious appetite for new things, he never did it at the expense of the people in his life. Instead, it gave him the opportunity to connect to and inspire so many lives on his brief journey.

I am grateful to Brenton for bringing all of us together here tonight in order to acknowledge and celebrate that sense of community. 10 days ago, when we settled on tonight as the date for this memorial, I had this moment of utter panic. I didn’t know how to plan a memorial. And so I sent out a call to arms to about a dozen people, which quickly expanded to a group of more than 20, and tonight has expanded to the 100+ people that are in this room. Everyone had their own talent, and their own relationship with Brenton, to offer. And they offered it generously and selflessly, and every one of you here tonight is an inspiration. In gathering here tonight Brenton has showed us that we all belong to the same community, the community of his friends and family.

Thank you for being here tonight to help celebrate Brenton.

As I said, Brenton moved through this life fearlessly. If I can take one gift from him, it will be the inspiration to move through my life with less fear. Next time, maybe, I’ll get up and say the things. Maybe. And when I do, I’ll think of Brenton.

i don’t write about work very often. which makes this blog lopsided and artificially lightweight, considering that my work is the thing i spent the largest portion of my time engaging with, thinking on, challenged by, dreaming about, worrying over, and/or being inspired by. but i try to adhere to the rule of posting nothing on the internet that i wouldn’t share with my mother or my boss. as i became a manager, that extended to things i wouldn’t want my employees to see, either. that gradually just made it harder and harder to write about work and so i stopped. according to this blog i live a bucolic life of baking, running, knitting, and fixing houses. i mean, i practically sitting around eating bonbons. not really.

except today i’m going to write about work.

one of my staff members died in a rock climbing accident last week. i’ll refer to him as BW here, out of courtesy to his family who have not given me leave to write about their son.

BW was our master electrician. he was the youngest member of my staff, and dangerously smart, the kind of smart that sometimes interfered with his ability to relate to and communicate with the normal human beings. on the surface he was quiet and reserved, but once you scratched the surface he could be wickedly funny. he seized on things that interested him with a sort of ferocity. he was briefly interested in running, so he decided to run the 16 miles from his house to the theatre. he wanted to build more muscle strength on his slight frame, so he joined a crossfit gym where tattooed soccer moms practically bench pressed him. working as the master electrician didn’t provide him with enough opportunities to hang suspended in the air, so he took up aerial circus classes and rock climbing in his spare time. it was as though he was pushing his body to meet the extraordinary performance metrics that came standard with his brain. like he was trying to balance the yin and yang of his physical body and his intelligence.

he often seemed like a loner, but it was actually just a combination of fierce independence and an burning interest in everything the world has to offer. there was no time to wait around trying to find someone else who wanted to go the same way. he pursued his interests with or without company, finding kindred spirits and traveling a while with them before continuing on his own path. i recognized this in him, because i share some of this tendency. it is both immensely satisfying and also a lonely way to move through the world.

every two- or three-day (or two- or three-week) span of free time that he could grab between shows would have him hopping in his car and running off to climb a mountain somewhere. when his work schedule made it impossible for him to leave town, he took aerial circus classes. i had to enact new safety rules in light of his passion for hanging in the air – no practicing aerial circus tricks in the theatre, no napping in a hammock suspended 20 feet above the stage, and so forth. i caught him working in the grid without a safety harness enough times that i had to discipline him with formal write-ups, warnings that rolled off him like water off a duck’s back.

BW was the sort of person who would accidently smash, misplace or otherwise disable his phone with some regularity, and go days without replacing it. disappearing off the grid was normal for him. he had taken his entire summer vacation to go camping and rock climbing solo in california. so when our management assistant got a call last wednesday from a deputy sheriff in california asking when we’d last heard from BW, i found it worrisome but i talked myself out of imagining any real danger. surely he’d just dropped his phone down a ravine and decided to finish his trip and pick up a new phone enroute to the airport on sunday. i expected him to arrive at work on monday looking sheepish and i’d scold him for not calling his mother often enough and causing her (and me) to worry.

but he didn’t turn up on monday. instead, i learned late friday night that he’d sustained fatal injuries when he fell nearly 500 feet while climbing in the high sierras of central california. i stayed up half that night, swinging between disbelief and guilt, anger and relief and more guilt.

guilt, for the many times that i wished BW would quit, so that I could replace him with a less difficult employee.

more guilt, over the fact that if i was a better, tougher manager, i wouldn’t have let him get away with taking an extra week of vacation. i would have insisted that he come back to work the week prior and now he’d be safely with us, resenting me but still alive.

relief, followed by guilt for having felt such selfish relief, that he didn’t die in an accident while working in my theatre. offering his mother my condolences was one of the hardest things i’ve ever done. i can’t even imagine what it would take to speak to his parents if he’d died on my watch.

and anger, at him for doing something so stupid as falling off a mountain. search and rescue told his parents that he didn’t make a mistake; it was just a freak accident. a mountain that has stood for hundreds of thousands of years decided not to stand any longer and crumbled beneath his feet. still, i know that BW took chances. maybe he didn’t make a technical error in the moment leading to his death. but he truly never believed that he could fall, and he placed himself in high risk situations because of that. this was a source of much conflict between us.

after a week, all that anger and relief and guilt and disbelief have morphed into sort of tired sadness. i think we are headed the same direction, me and tired and sad. i guess we three will travel together for a while.

i woke on saturday morning knowing i had to do a lot of really hard things. there were many dozens of phone calls, emails and texts to be sent in the process of notifying all the members of my staff, of our company, and of the theatre community. and i had to call his parents.

when i’m facing a difficult day, i start by going running. the tougher the day, the harder or faster i run. i run until i catch up with the calm and the strength that i need. i find it in the miles, in the sweat, in the sunrise over choppy lake waters. saturday morning i woke up drained and exhausted after four hours of fitful sleep. i was in no physical shape for a run. and yet, once i got out the door and headed for the lake, running felt like flying. it freed me, the way it always does. i had space to compose my thoughts and gather my courage for the day ahead. to make my voice strong and my words kind. running is my solace, my strength, my muse. and i think that’s how BW felt when he was climbing. like he was free. flying. i hope he found his solace and his strength out there.

this was the last thing he posted on facebook:

farewell, BW. thanks for traveling alongside me for a while.

the wildlife count from this morning’s run out to marblehead lighthouse:

herons, blue (2)
herons, white (3)
ladybug, red (1)
feral cat, tortoiseshell (1)
baby bunny, brown (1)
doe, brown with spots (1)

I really wish we could buy plane tickets in 10-packs, as we skip back and forth between our two homes: California and Chicago. I can’t be in one without missing the other. This past weekend we ditch our Chicago home in favor of some time in our California home.

We started the weekend out with Maker Faire: everything from 3d printers and CNC routers to drone battles and animatronic skeletons, a huge lego city, steam punk technology and wearable LED technology, frankenbikes to ride and frankenbikes to admire, handmade art and locally-grown food, lessons on how to do and make just about anything.

everything cool is that way or that way

el pulpo mechanico

lock-picking workshop

Sunday we ran Bay to Breakers: 7.4 miles across the city from the Bay Bridge to Ocean Beach, one big costume party. San Francisco doesn’t get any weirder than this, and as long as you get out before the drunk college kids stop having fun and start weeping in the streets, it’s all good. We had beautiful sunny weather. And viking costumes that kept us warm at the finish line at Ocean Beach.

the family that pillages and plunders together stays together.

victory!

After the race we refueled with mexican food in Palo Alto, then played at the park with Geneva and Bode and helped Teresa put tomato plants in their community garden plot.

bode, standing atop a mound of bark twice his height. this kid, like his older sister, has a love of climbing, no fear of heights, and leathery tough hobbit feet.

geneva, making her fiercest bull face.

Monday we went up to San Francisco to spend more time with our new nephew, Theo, just 10 weeks old. (no pictures, he’s internet-shy. you’ll have to take my word for it: he’s perfect.)

the cats are a bit traumatized at the arrival of the new baby.

Later we drove to Mill Valley, dropped in on my former co-workers, had lunch at the incomparable Sol Food, and climbed the Dipsea stairs and hiked one of my favorite trails in Marin.

even the furniture likes to get out and enjoy the forest on a beautiful day like this.

Tuesday we got up early and ran across campus, stopped in to admire the beautiful Memorial Church, the dusty dry Lake Lag, the Row and White Plaza still deserted and sleepy in the early morning hours.

still beautiful, Stanford.

After brunch we stopped in for tours at two very different startups: our friend Joe’s company, Curious.com, and Chris’s startup, EtaGen. EtaGen is too top secret for me to even tell you what they do, but it’s pretty awesome.

Then back to the airport and on a flight to Chicago, where real-life resumes: theatre and websites and fixing up the money pit and yowling cats. and summer. finally, glorious summer.

i’m going to take a short break from complaining writing about the house here, and do something i almost never do: write about work.

if one used this blog to create a [figurative] picture of me, it would be fair to assume that i am a happily-married cat lady who exists only to pursue cooking, running, and knitting, probably in that order. being somewhat at the forefront of the blogging movement* (er, and now lurking around in inconsequential obscurity for a dozen years), i established good social media policies for myself long before most companies, and undergrads, were grappling with them. my rule is simple: never put anything on the internet that i wouldn’t want my mother or my boss to read. extrapolating from that rule pretty much covers everything.

but this means that i don’t write about work very often. which is weird, given what a large percentage of my time and emotional energy are devoted to my career. but setting up filters and user accounts always feels like too much work and sort of defeats the purpose of the blog as it exists for me. i’m not writing to an audience as much as i am writing to the ether. the ether shouldn’t need a login and password. but i also know that anything that goes on the internet can eventually be traced back to me, and that net privacy is an illusion. and so i self-edit.

anyway, this is one of those rare occasions. i’m in Forth Worth, Texas, for the annual USITT** and Production Managers’ Forum conferences (held concurrently in the same city every spring). USITT is a highly structured week long conference featuring hundreds of sessions on a wide range of subjects, but primarily technical and management issues. the PMF conference is a highly unstructured conference in which 50-80 of the Production Managers in the country agree to get in the same room, and afterwards go to the same bar, for two days. in exchange for free conference passes to USITT and some meeting space for our own conference, we provide a certain number of conference sessions at USITT. and seeing as how we’re country’s theatre hiring managers, they like to have us at a conference that is largely devoted to helping young technicians and designers launch their careers.

i had a REALLY stressful week leading up to this conference. stuff with the house renovation is, well, expensive and problematic. (more on that in the next post). i had some of those tough manager moments at work that i CAN’T actually talk about on the internet. ben and i have made two road trips across Ohio in the past month, one for a funeral, one for a wedding. there has been ZERO downtime in our lives. winter STILL ISN’T FUCKING OVER.

i had agreed to be on a panel discussion at USITT a year ago and suddenly it was only a week away and i hadn’t done half the reading i had meant to and my panel group was scrambling to make our session agenda (session title: The Risk of Not Deciding). also i remembered much too late that i hate speaking in public. and that leading a session at this conference implies that i am somehow an expert, which i really really didn’t feel like leading up to this week.

i couldn’t back out of the conference session, but i started entertaining the idea of just flying in on Thursday, doing the panel, and heading home the first thing the next morning. but i knew that making time for these meetings with other production managers always helps me tremendously and i talked myself into staying all weekend.

one of the peculiarities about the field i’m in is that i don’t manage other people like myself. i manage a team of incredibly diverse, talented, sometimes difficult, sometimes delightful, always complex artists, artisans and technicians. i can’t do what they do. they can’t do what i do. so i often feel like a lone wolf at work. and i spend most of my waking hours at work. it can get really lonely.

these conferences are the one time each year that i get to spend 2-3 days with people just like me. who face the same challenges and frustrations. we can share the stories that we can’t discuss in our own theatres. we trade advice. i get new ideas. we stay out late in the bars and we don’t just talk about theatre, we talk production management. this week i met some PMs who are also fellow runners and we got up early every morning and ran along along the Trinity River and talked more there. i always leave these conferences feeling inspired and full of new ideas. i stop thinking about what my exit-strategy for theatre is for a little while and realize that i have a pretty amazing and unique job.

i’ve been attending these conferences approximately once a year for almost a decade now. and i just realized that a part of me finally DOES feel like a professional. i’m finally confident enough to speak up in the group meetings. i’m not an assistant or an associate and i run a respectably large theatre. my USITT panel lecture actually went pretty well. i learned some new things while planning it, and i think i shared a few good, original ideas. my colleagues seem to respect me. i just *might* be a grownup.

after dreading this panel lecture intensely for the past few weeks, i can’t believe this but i actually proposed a new session for next year and volunteered to lead the panel (session title: The Production Manager’s Role in the Design Process). i mean, i have at least 11 and a half months to procrastinate before i have to put it together, right?

* we still called them “web logs” when slithy-tove was opened in the spring of 2001. we also walked uphill both ways in the snow to get to school every morning.

I had a such a lovely weekend in California. I got in late Thursday night and met Ben at his motel in Berkeley. The next morning I hopped a train for Pleasanton and spent the morning catching up over coffee with my college roommate, and the afternoon hanging out with her and her kids (burritos and legos!) The back to Berkeley for happy hour drinks with Ben’s coworkers, and a few of us continued on to Little Star for what I maintain is the best pizza in the world. Saturday we had a beautiful run up Strawberry Canyon in the Berkeley hills, then breakfasted on tortillas, salsa and eggs at a cute breakfast place near campus. Then off to San Francisco to hang out with Matt and Carrie and see their new house in Noe Valley. We devoted the afternoon to the pursuit of coffee and poking around a yarn shop, then home to admire the amazing view from their kitchen window, and play scrabble and eat Indian takeout. Sunday morning Chris and Teresa and the kids drove up from Palo Alto and we all walked down* to Tartine Bakery, loaded up on pastries and coffee and took the kids to the playground at Dolores Park. Then Matt whisked us off to the airport to await our [much too soon] flight home.

The unusual weather happening both in California and Chicago makes the comparison between places extra painful right now. Normally it should be 30’s and a little snowy in Chicago, and 50’s and rainy/foggy in California right now. But the drought in Cali means that it’s sunny and 70, while in Chicago the polar vortex means that we have a foot of snow and temps as low as -16 degrees. Subtract a few more degrees for windchill and we’re looking at a temperature spread of 100 degrees. It’s too much. I just hate winter. And it’s only the 3rd week of January! But I love my friends and my theatre community and my husband and the cost of living and my new house, and those things are all in Chicago.

I know that no matter where I live, Chicago or California, I will miss the other one. Until Ben and I figure out how to create our bi-coastal** existence, anyway. I wish we could buy plane tickets in 10-packs!

On the agenda for our next trip to California: Bay to Breakers, Maker Faire, visiting my new nephew***, and hopefully taking my niece to see some children’s theatre for the first time. Between now and then, I just have to tech two shows and we have to renovate an entire house. No bigs.

* Or skipped, depending on individual preference
** That’s west coast and third coast, for those of you who think only in terms of east and west
*** Scheduled to debut in March!