Tough

I wrote the following post two weeks ago and didn't post it because I thought that for a reader who wasn't there experiencing the tone and attitude of the guy who said this, it sounds like I'm being too harsh in my reaction.  Writing the words he said does not accurately convey my perception of them in context.  So I didn't post it.  Since then, this guy has been mildly irritating every day I'm there by constantly trying to flirt with me when I'm trying to work.  I've been told that another woman at work completely ignores him and doesn't acknowledge his presence.  That seemed like it would be rude for me to do, so I have been politely and distantly friendly, yet even mere politeness seems to encourage his constant flirting.  Then the other night, when I found myself having to re-count something when trying to close the bar because he was harassing me about whether I'd "come back to visit" when I left and "how are we going to keep in touch" and asking for my facebook info, the mild irritation morphed into anger, not at him specifically but at the fact that every day I have to put up with being harassed by him when I'm trying to work.  If I were in an office, I could report it to human resources.  If I were working in the position of stage manager, I could either handle it myself or report it to the company manager or Equity.  But here, we work for different bosses, I have no power, and my choices seem to be either to ignore him and pretend he's invisible or to put up with him constantly trying to flirt with me just because he can.  I'm done with that job now, but being in that position where I feel powerless and harassed makes me mad.  And then today on my way to work, in lieu of the normal catcalls, a guy actually reached out and tried to grab me, succeeding in making contact before I swung my bag at him.  So I'm angry right now.  I never send e-mails when I'm angry, and I don't post blog posts when I'm angry (which has resulted in several lovely maybe-not-so-eloquent rants getting discarded).  But this one I'm posting angry.  From my first day on the job:

What a 20-ish guy I don't know at the same place of employment condescendingly (but thinking he was being oh-so-charming) said to me my first day on a part-time day job when he overheard my trainer and me speaking:

"You're adorable -- you'll do fine.  You're so cute. But this city will eat you alive. You gotta learn how to be tough to live here. You're gonna need to toughen up."

To that guy, what I wanted to say but didn't, on behalf of all strong tough "cute" women:  Umm, I've been living here since you were a teenager, thank you very much, and just because I might be adorable on occasion [I mean, I am pretty cute when I wear my wide assortment of Disney clothes...] and still get stopped by those tour guides in midtown and asked if I want to take a tour bus [seriously, is that ever going to end?], that doesn't mean that I'm not tough as nails.  I've managed complex teams in stressful situations many times before and run some very tough techs with some very tough people, making me prepared for anything this city can throw at me.  I've fought hard battles, faced rejection you probably haven't even had the opportunity to yet, was toughened up as much by my high school in Indiana as by New York, and I'm still standing here.  Would you tell a guy you just met at work who you learned is on his first day on the job that he's "cute" so he'll be fine, but he needs to toughen up to make it here?  No?  Well then thanks but no thanks, and keep your ignorance of my toughness to yourself.

Sincerely,
The adorable new girl

Golden silence

I have a severe problem with loud noises.  It started before I was even born.  My mom tells me that when she was pregnant with me, if she tried to see an action movie, I would kick like crazy in protest during all the loud parts (i.e. most of the movie), and she'd have to comfort me through her tummy.  I was generally a very non-kicky pre-born baby, so if she wanted to make sure I was doing okay in there, she'd just head to the local movie theatre and see the latest action flick, and off I'd go.

Being born didn't help my tolerance for loud noises.  As a kid, when my parents took my brother and me to fireworks, I'd cry all the way through them while holding my hands on my ears.  When I was older, I hated parties and school dances because of the music that to me seemed ten times too loud, I almost cried at my brother's high school graduation class party because I couldn't handle the blaring music (to the point that my mom had to drive me home early), and I did cry at Blue Man Group because of the noise (well, the noise and the claustrophobia of having mountains of toilet paper passed over my head and feeling like I was surrounded by a group of mob-mentality-driven lemmings who had lost all capacity for independent thought and would do absolutely anything asked of them, but my hatred of Blue Man Group and perception of it as the deepest circle of Hell really deserves its own blog post.  I digress.).

Anyway, I would like to say that as an adult I am now better at handling loud noise, but really I'm only better at covering my problem with it when I have to in order to seem like the mature adult I sometimes am. (Fortunately, this does not include when I'm around my fiancé -- Just this summer when a beach-stroll date with him unexpectedly included fireworks, I petulantly covered my ears and literally dragged him away from them, forcing him to walk backwards to see them... but hey, he still got to enjoy them... so it's all good.)  Loud noise to me feels like someone is beating my eardrums while wrapping me head-to-toe in an oppressive black wool spider-web-lined blanket that I can't fight my way out of.  SO... what is my job today?  Working a theatre bar at a hip show in the Village catering to audiences college-aged through their 20s, with music that blares incessantly at a deafening volume into the lobby for all 2 hours and 30 minutes.  I spent my first week on this job (in which I work the bar at multiple theatres) at a lovely off-Broadway theatre with a fantastic play that I could watch parts of and listen to the rest of through the walls when not serving the laid-back audience, who drank more Stellas and Diet Cokes than anything else.  Here, on my first day at this very different theatre bar, I'm routinely consulting the menu after they order to interpret what they just ordered, which, I realized about two minutes after opening, is usually in French and about five words longer than the way the drink is written on my sales sheet.  The other show I've worked on this job is at Lincoln Center -- so peaceful and dignified.  I'm great with either the suit-and-dress, classy and elegant Lincoln Center scene or the fun, ready-for-a-laugh, beer-drinking scene, but the hip and happening (and I think by even referring to it as "hip and happening" I am making myself most decidedly not hip or happening) trendy scene?  If volume is a requirement, then I think not so much.

So on my break during Act II, when I got to the point that I was actively working not to cry and have the other workers wonder what the heck was wrong with me that I was randomly crying when there was nothing wrong, I tried to find respite from the aural abuse by sitting in the stairwell -- where I immediately was in someone's way.  So then I tried upstairs in the wardrobe/ green room but was feeling suffocated by all the incense.... so now I'm on a couch in the bathroom, enjoying some blissful reprieve from the oppressive enveloping layer of sound that awaits outside.  On one hand, I feel like writing in the bathroom probably makes me the super anti-social weird girl, but on the other hand, all the other bartenders are on their phones in the lobby and couldn't have a conversation even if they wanted to, so I don't think I'm missing out on much....  Next time I work here I think I'll just be the weird anti-social girl with earplugs.

Tips on Tips (and other observations from behind the bar)

 Lessons and observations from my first week working a theatre bar:

 - My tips have nothing to do with my service.  They do, however, correlate strongly to my hairstyle.  A low braid over one shoulder doesn't get me any tips, and few people will initiate chit-chat.  Seriously, I made half my normal tips when I put my hair in a low braid.  Hair half up and half down is okay, but hair all the way down gets the most tips.  Hair up in a messy bun also gets good tips, particularly from women, who are quick to engage me in chit-chat.

 - Women who are by themselves and straight men under 40 by themselves or with other straight men rarely tip.  If they do and they paid with a credit card, the tip is almost always on the card.  And a straight man under 40 by himself who does leave a cash tip usually fumbles around in his pocket and leaves the tip when I'm serving another customer, about a minute after he's paid for his drink.

 - Women with other women tip wonderfully.  They're also very chatty and seem like the happiest customers of the night.

 - Men with girlfriends tip very well, and usually by cash even if it's on a credit card -- as do their girlfriends when the girlfriends interject that they'll get the tip themselves.

 - If a man over 40 is in a suit or sport jacket, he will use words like "mademoiselle" and say he's leaving you a tip for your jet flight.  If you don't understand what he means by the jet flight thing, just smile and laugh, and he'll pull out an extra dollar and throw it in.  I could Google if the jet flight thing is code or something, but I'm kind of afraid of what I might find, so I'm just gonna leave it.

 - Dads with kids who don't have the mom with them have to be reminded to put their credit card in their pocket and not walk away with it on the bar....  No one's left a kid at the bar though, so that's good.

 - I have now either worked with, eaten dinner with, served a drink and snack to, or been driven two hours back from set with a famous TV parent icon from the 60s (Mrs. Brady -- I know, it started in '69, but "barely counting" still counts), 70s (Mrs. Cunningham), 80s (Elyse Keaton) and 90s (Danny Tanner).  Now if I can just work with Lauren Graham, I'll be up-to-date.

Sometimes I miss the third grade

When I was in the third grade, I remember a classroom exercise where we had to write out directions for someone to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from scratch, starting with the bread in a closed bag and the peanut butter and jelly both in closed jars.  We had to write in excruciating detail; the teacher would not perform any action not specifically detailed in our instructions, and if we wrote something like "spread the jelly on the bread" without first specifying how she needed to pick up the knife with one hand, how to hold the knife, how she needed to get jelly on the knife (after previously detailing how to open the jar), how to spead jelly, etc., she would stop and not complete the task.  I remember loving the assignment and writing a whole paragraph just on undoing the twisty tie on the bread bag and getting one bread slice out.  I love precision when choosing words in writing, and I frequently think of that exercise.  I thought of it when taking the critical reading portions of standardized tests in school and finding a lack of precision in the writing that led to either multiple answers being correct or none being correct without more precision in the diction.  I thought of it in middle school when we had a great textbook called "Word Within the Word" that examined the Latin and Greek roots of words, and our tests consisted of giving word-perfect definitions for both the roots and the words.  And I thought of it this week when taking a test based on the training manual for a new part-time job and being utterly frustrated with the inconsistencies between the words in the manual and the answers available from which to choose.  I feel like writing short explanations in the margins of why none of the above is correct based on the words selected in the manual... but I also feel like that would probably be frowned upon....  So instead I'm writing this blog post, urging everyone to write out instructions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  It's an awesome exercise, really.  And you get to reward yourself with yummy deliciousness upon completion.  Oh, and on a related note, be careful with your grammar, too.  After all, punctuation saves lives....
 

Welcome to showbiz -- You're cut

No one's safe from the editing scissors until they actually make it on screen.  Anthony LaPaglia shot scenes as Al Capone for Road To Perdition but appears nowhere in the film.  There's a whole storyline with an old man and his dead wife in The Sixth Sense that was completely cut from that film. Winona Ryder's seemingly inexplicable casting as 30-years-older Spock's mom in the opening scenes of Star Trek was actually because she shot scenes as her own age, which were all cut, leaving only bad-age-makeup-Ryder in the film.  (I'm still hoping my awesome FBI day makes it into its film....)  And along with those lost performances and many more in the black hole of "you're cut" oblivion is, apparently, Tweety Dave....  From my Late Show With David Letterman internship journal: 

....This week also included what I thought was the funniest bit to be created for the show since my internship started.  Unfortunately, it didn't make it onto the show, and I'm not sure if Dave even knew it existed, as it was made during the taping in response to something he improvised.  During the second act, when he sits at his desk, Dave inexplicably started speaking in a high-pitched nasally cartoon voice, and after some banter with Paul about it, he offhandedly remarked that he hoped to one day have his own cartoon character.  I'm not sure whose idea it was, but the graphics team started quickly making a cartoon character for Dave, to be used if he did the voice again later in the show.  It was a Tweety Bird knock-off with a caricature of Dave for the face, complete with glasses and moving mouth, and everyone in the control room thought it was hilarious.  Unfortunately, once it was finished, Dave never did the voice again, and the control room was disappointed that "Tweety Dave" would never get a chance to debut.  As Biff said to us the first day of our internship though [when the interns were supposed to be used in a skit but were cut due to time restrictions], "Welcome to showbiz; you're cut." 


More from my Late Show journal: 

http://www.behindtheseen.me/2015/08/you-write-about-what-you-can.html

http://www.behindtheseen.me/2015/09/making-lemons-out-of-lemonade-or.html

Making lemons out of lemonade... or lemonade out of lemons... or something like that

When I interned at the Late Show With David Letterman, I had to keep a journal and submit it half-way through the internship to my advisor at Indiana University to get credit.  I forgot all about it until, as a result of my mom's e-mail account going berzerk and spitting out years-old e-mails at her, she sent it to me a few weeks ago.  Though the writing in the 25-page document has the somewhat stilted, sanitized filter of a journal written for school credit, my favorite entries (aside from the one where I write perfectly seriously about a chicken suit) are about all the things that went wrong during shows and how the Late Show team dealt with them -- usually creating a bit that was funnier with the mistakes than it would have been had the bit run perfectly.  A snippet from one of those entries:

The writers of this show have a gift for making lemons out of lemonade [...Yeah, I know, but that's what I wrote -- Freudian slip?... though I do actually enjoy eating lemons....], and it's always fascinating to see how they will overcome obstacles to put on a great show night after night.  This week, there was supposed to be an appearance by the "Man on Fire," a recurring character who runs across the stage on fire.  To do this stunt, a Broadway house is required to have a fireman present.  The show found out during rehearsal that the fire department was too busy that day and could not send someone over.  Despite repeated phone calls, the fire department wouldn't budge [Though it's not in my journal, if I remember correctly, the show didn't put in the request until the day of, so the non-sanitized version of this entry would probably be a lesson in why not to procrastinate...], and we thought we would have to put off the bit until tomorrow.  However, the writers realized there was a way to use the Man on Fire that would be funnier than him running across the stage screaming and on fire [2015-me has to admit I fail to see what's so hilarious about a person running and screaming while on fire, so I'm not sure it would be that hard to come up with a funnier way to use him, but maybe that's just me....] -- have The Man on Fire run across the stage screaming and NOT on fire... to be extinguished at the end.  The audience ate it up, and Dave explained that The Man on Fire wasn't on fire because they couldn't get a permit.  Making fun of their inability to do the originally planned joke wound up being funnier than the original -- and, as a few staffers noted, was conveniently way cheaper.

Gotta earn your rejection

There's a lot of rejection in this business.  The more auditions you go on, the more rejection you'll get; it's just a fact, and if you're not okay with getting rejected more times than you get job offers, you should probably find a different career path.  I get that.  But I do put a limit on who can reject me -- I generally don't find it acceptable for people to walk down the street and just randomly tell me they reject me, which is pretty much what happened today....  I got an e-mail from someone I don't know, for whom I've never auditioned, telling me she's decided to go in a different direction and will be using a different dancer on her current project....  Okaaaay?  Different direction from what?  Can't be a different direction from me, because neither of us knows what direction I would be on this, and I have no clue what this project is, but I am positive I didn't audition for it or anything else she's done.  Don't you have to actually call someone in before you can reject them?  When I was involved in casting a musical last year, I'm pretty sure we didn't e-mail every dancer we knew of to let them know we'd be going in a different direction from them....

This afternoon I auditioned for a major-label music video, and I appeared to be the only ballet/jazz/contemporary dancer they'd invited in a room full of hip-hop and street dancers....  They can go in a different direction by deciding not to use me.  But this choreographer who e-mailed me a rejection notice that served no purpose other than to throw some unearned random rejection my way cannot.

So, to this unknown random choreographer, I'm sorry, but I've decided to go in a different direction.  I reject your rejection.