14/48: The World's Quickest Theater Festival: Behind The Scenes

I wander to the costume shop and find Rachel Atkins and Andrew McMasters, part of our design team. Andrew runs off to do designer-y things and Rachel stays to talk with me a bit.

I ask her what the weirdest request was so far today, which takes her a minute..

"Oh! The 'evil hat' and the Christopher Walken wig!" I'm intrigued! "The most fun has been the marionette dolls and all their accessories. Because that's been like dressing a bunch of big Barbie dolls.. I got their bows and their ribbons and their petticoats!" She's very wide-eyed and smiley as she says this. She's fuckin cute.

I ask her if things have gone quicker today. "Yeah, nothing was like the Restoration England piece yesterday. That one was really tough. And also we know more of what we're doing today."

Yesterday before the 8pm show I ran into Andrew in the kitchen/break room and asked how he felt about the day and if he had any advice because I was designing next week.

"Pretty good. Part of the difficulty is we only had about four hours and at least half of that we were trying to figure out where things were and what we had to work with. And if we didn't have it, where were we going to get it. So I think tomorrow will be a lot smoother. And if you're around, just make a note of where things are. It'll save you a lot of time."

Right. Ok. Done.

I relay this to Katie Driscoll who's volunteering and working hard with Teri and Alex as part of our kitchen staff who'll also be designing with me next week (I'm super excited about this. She's awesome AND funny.). She mentioned she'd talked with Gerard Menendez, our genius designer's, Gary, genius brother, who twice came very close to finishing requested set pieces and both were nixed during tech. His advice was not to get too attached to anything. Clearly. We'll have channel our zen energy I assume. Check back next week to see if we accomplish that.

I have nothing funny to end this with. This is how serious design is, people!