I Won!

I won! I actually won! True, it’s a symbolic victory, but a win is a win and there’s still a prize! So… I win!

You see, the state of the stage at the moment can only be described as pathetic. It should be black, but it’s currently more of a whitish grey. Except for the parts that have been scrubbed raw and show bare wood. Aesthetically, it’s disheartening. But considering that the underside of the canvas is filthy and covered footprints, and there are paper petals littering the ground before the bleachers, you really can’t hope for the argument of attractiveness to count for very much.

Because we use so much paint throughout the show, the stage gets a good scrubbing every night and in the year and a half since it was last painted, it has been polished to a smooth and slippery finish. What’s worrisome about the stage in this state (for me more than anyone else, with the exception of A, though to a lesser degree) is that it becomes very unpredictable. As a result, there is one figure in my act that becomes dangerous for me, the musicians, and even the public.

It’s called a High Speed Spiral and involves pushing off the floor during a regular spiral. By pushing off the floor, I pick up a lot of speed very quickly and the circle becomes very big and is maintained at a pretty sharp angle. When the floor has good bite, no worries. When it’s slippery like it is now, the wheel can slide out from under itself at any moment and with no warning whatsoever. Because I’m going so fast, I can easily slide three meters. And depending where I am on stage when that happens, I can take out the musicians, or fall off the stage into the public.

I slid once (right before the stage was last painted) and it scared the Directors enough that they acted. I’d been warning them of the danger of sliding for ages (the worry then had been paint or water on stage) but they never took me seriously until they saw it happen. Fortunately, nothing serious happened that time.

But back to the story at hand.

Recently I’ve noticed that the stage slides in some places and not others. But most worrisome is the feeling that, during the High Speed Spiral, I’m actually fighting against the wheel to keep it in control. I’ve felt that it wants to slide out from under me, and it’s a scary feeling to try and maintain control over a huge object that is bigger and heavier than you are, and also traveling at high speed at a precarious angle.

So I spoke with the head technician to see if he would speak to the technical director about repainting the stage. We both laughed and agreed that the answer would probably be no. These days, the company doesn’t seem to want to invest another dime in this show. Let alone a hundred bucks on floor paint. That can wait for the new show.

Seeing as the title of this post announced victory, you’ve probably guessed that the answer was, in fact, yes. The floor will be painted in a week. But I can’t help but think that the thing that tipped the scale in the favour of immediate action was the extended extensions of the show in this city. Normally, the weekend is only two days long, but for the next set of prolongations (we’re already in the first set), we’ll only be doing three shows a week. That leaves just enough time for sanding, painting, and drying. Were it not for those few extra days, there’s no way they would have agreed to paint the stage. It would have been too much of a pain to set everything up for something as trivial as a paint job.

But in the end, none of that matters! In just one more week of shows, I’ll have a newly painted floor to scuff up! Hooray!