Re: OOC # 34
Glad I get along with the theater manager...
I'm helping one of the local high schools with their production of Mary Poppins...the stage version is MASSIVELY different from the film (obviously...you can't do a production number with animated penguins on stage, for starters). One of those differences is, Mary's magical abilities are exposed through her animating a statue in the park (a cluster of them, in this production), which leads into the whole 'Jolly Holiday' number.
In order to do the statues, the costume designer bought a bunch of gray morph suits, then made some vaguely Classical Greek items out of some gray and white fabric to go over them. Well, the problem is, the fabric looks like marble...but the suits look NOTHING like marble.
So, I'm painting them to look like they at least live in the same color world as the togas and such. But I don't have any room to lay them out at home, and definitely don't have room to work on five of them at a time.
So I'm doing it in the projection room (two of our theaters are side by side, and the projection room for both of them is basically a long, extra-wide hall that runs the length of their back walls, so there's actually quite a bit of room). I told her what I was doing and she didn't even bat an eye, just laughed and nodded and went back to what she was doing.
I've got two left to finish...and me being me, I got here at, like, 7:30, then kept getting distracted by this and that and didn't start painting until 11. And the paint, when I first started, was too watery, so the one side of both those suits that I did first doesn't look much like marble...it's a slightly lighter shade of gray, but it's at least not shiny anymore. Waiting for the second side (which turned out MUCH better) to dry enough that I can go back and repaint the first side one more time, now that I've got the paint-to-water proportions a little more dialed in.
And I know, if she'd been the one working tonight, when she came up to shut everything down, she'd ask how much longer I'd be (not because she would wait up...more to get a gauge of how my project was progressing, as two of her sons have been extensively involved in theater and she's an inveterate DIYer when it comes to decor and landscaping)...then laugh, when I told her that I'd be here for at least another hour, maybe hour and a half.
Maybe I'll sneak downstairs and move my car from around the corner to out in front of the theater. When I got here tonight, there wasn't a place to park anywhere close to convenient...had to park up the road across Main Street from the theater (we don't have our own parking lot...parking is ALWAYS an adventure on a busy day.)