My
favorite TV show these days is TV Land's Younger, about 40-year-old
divorced suburban Jersey mom Liza pretending to be a 26-year-old so that
she can get a job in a publishing house to put her daughter through
college.... The show is actually about Liza reliving her 20s, this time
as a hip Brooklynite career girl and with the wisdom of a 40-year-old --
but getting to have the kind of fun she didn't get the chance to
experience when she was really in her 20s and a housewife and young mom
who never had the opportunity to enter the workforce.
One
of the major appeals of the show is of course that everyone can
identify with the desire to relive their younger years and make
different, frequently wiser, choices. The opportunity to apply who we
are now to situations we faced in the past can be endlessly appealing. Though
closer to Liza's pretend age than her real age, I nevertheless
frequently run into instances where I'm confronted with how much I've
grown since my early 20s, and I sometimes can't believe the choices I
made then. Sometimes, looking back, I smile at my naiveté and hopefully
look at my choices as a learning experience. And sometimes they just
make me mad, and I wish I could slap my younger self for not being my
current self. Many times, aspects of my 22-year-old self are nowhere to
be seen anymore, and much of that I credit to my stage management
experience; being forced to manage teams and difficult situations, to be
extremely assertive (while still maintaining grace), and to stand up
both for myself and for others has brought out a side of me that too
often in my early 20s simmered under the surface rather than roaring to
the front with a fire.
The
other day I ran into someone I once crossed paths with professionally,
and it reminded me of an instance that I acted in a way I don't even
recognize as myself anymore....
At
the time, a good friend of mine was working on a show with this production
assistant. The production assistant needed a sub during the run of the show, and as I was
completely qualified, my friend arranged for me to sub for her. At the time
that I accepted the sub position, the PA was unpaid, but immediately after I
accepted and well before I actually did the subbing, the production
started paying her. My subbing for the week was unofficial (it never
went through the producers), and it is standard in that case for the
stage manager/production assistant to pay their salary for their missed
shows directly to their sub. I asked my friend (who was the
PA's boss, and therefore my boss for the week) to make sure she paid me.
He would not. He said I accepted the sub position without knowing she
was going to be paid for that week, and it would be giving me
preferential treatment for him to make her pay me her week's salary (for
the week she wasn't working and I was). I fumed about it and was
furious that I was doing her work and she was getting paid for it and
her boss wouldn't even ASK her to properly reimburse me. If it had been
anyone else -- anyone who wasn't a friend -- subbing for her, that person would have gotten paid -- so
it wouldn't have been giving me preferential treatment to do the same
for me; it would have been treating me with the same respect a stage
manager should give any sub working for them. It would have been the
right thing to do. But I only fumed quietly inside.
I never asked the PA herself about it, and I didn't put up much of a
fight with my friend/stage manager boss. So I did a week of work for
no money while someone else got paid that week's salary to go on
vacation.
Today
I don't recognize the girl (and it was a girl, not a woman) who let
that happen. Today, regardless of my relationship to the stage manager, I
would say, "If she's getting paid, I need to be paid to do her work.
It's what's fair, and if I'm not paid, I'm not doing it." And I
wouldn't think twice about going straight to the PA and explaining that
if I'm subbing for her she needs to pay me her wage for that work. What
I wouldn't do is quietly accept my value as a worker being disrespected
and diminished because someone else was afraid of how it would look to
treat me fairly.
I
gradually developed skills that allowed me to move up from working as a
production assistant and to move into assistant stage management
positions and then production stage management, and I began working for a
wider variety of production groups. Though I had not initially planned
to work as a stage manager (I more or less fell
into it when I got a job as a PA on an Off-Broadway show my first week
out of college), I am so thankful I spent time climbing the ranks. It
forced me to find my courage in standing up to people. So many times in
the last few years, I've found myself in the position of protecting
others, whether from falling scenery that producers didn't care about or
tumbling repeatedly on a cement floor or being pressured to let
producers break union rules. There was a time when I would have been
uncomfortable at work in the role of being the voice for others who
don't want to speak up, but I find myself so frequently slipping into
that role now.
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