My Week in Show Biz

It’s many things, but life is never dull.... I emailed some of you about my commercial shoot, but here’s the rest of what happened this week. 

Sunday, I was house managing the matinee at Theatre West and as I was about to open the house to the audience, an electrical fire broke out in the light booth. I had walked into the house to check with the Stage Manager to see if I could bring in the audience and immediately saw smoke in the booth. Ernie, the Stage Manager was inside the booth reaching for something (it turned out to be a fire extinguisher). I immediately rushed out to get the lobby fire extinguisher. In the short time it took me to rush back in, smoke had filled the booth, but Ernie had the booth fire extinguisher and was working on putting it out. I handed off the lobby extinguisher to the producer and told him I’m evacuating the building. Everyone got out of the lobby quickly, as I told them to, and I ran upstairs to evacuate anyone up there. It was fortunate that our heroic stage manager happened to be in the booth when it happened and eventually put it out, but not before the lobby was overtaken by smoke. I inhaled quite a bit of acrid smoke and had some bad reactions to it that lasted for a couple of days (as did Ernie).

On Weds., I had a pre-shoot meeting for the Best Buy commercial & some of the crew were sick. Since my resistance was way down because of the smoke and my asthma, by Thursday, shoot day, I was sick & had laryngitis. I took everything under the sun and was able to speak (albeit in my best Brenda Vaccaro), and thankfully the shoot was MOS. By Thursday night, my voice was gone. Yesterday, I cancelled my rehearsal and stayed in bed until I had to leave for the theater. I’m house managing all weekend. I prepped the theatre, assigned tasks to the Ushers, and left before the audience arrived. I’m somewhat better today, but am staying in bed until I go to the theater tonight. Unfortunately, there is no one available to house manage so like last night, I’ll go set everything up (wearing surgical gloves, of course!) etc., and go home. Bah! 

On a lighter note, the director, producer, crew, ad agency and Best Buy reps loved (their word) my work. They laughed at almost everything I did. I was very happy about that. :-)

Ah, the life of an actor!