A little bit of wisdom for all of my loyal readers….

If you have to call England, try not to use your cell phone.

8 minutes = $9.15

Yahoo! News – Complete List of 2002 Grammy Winners

I dunno. It just seems a bit….off.

Also, Entertainment Weekly was way off in their predictions. WAY off.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you “Stupid Comcast Theater”:

Me: Hi, Comcast tech support person. I’m having a problem. I went to set up an e-mail account for my wife this morning, and now neither account is working.

Comcast person: Okay, let me check to see if they’re showing up. *Does some typing* Yep. They’re both here.

Me: Okay, well, when I go to send mail, it leaves just fine, but I’m not receiving any mail.

Comcast person: Oh, yeah. It might be a few days. The servers are down. Hopefully they’ll be back in the next few days. It’s been that way since the weekend.

Me: Ummm….okay. So…that’s it? The servers are just down?

Comcast person: Yep. You might be able to send mail, but you shouldn’t be receiving it.

Me: Ummm…..okay. Well…..bye.

That’s it. No apology. No, “We’re sorry service is down. We won’t be billing you for these days.” I hate these people…

I spent the day in Connecticut today. Man, that’s a long drive. But I think it was good for the soul. I was feeling sorta….blah…yesterday. Spending some time with old friends in CT and hanging out and talking sound…it was nice. Too bad I had to drive over 3 hours each way to do it.

I actually feel good. I’m happy with my work. I don’t know if it’s the magnificent group of kids and incredible staff I got to work with, or if it’s the fact that both shows today went wonderfully, but I’m really happy. I got many compliments not only from staff members, but also from alumni who came to see the show, and so had a basis of comparison. I left feeling good.

I can’t think of much more to say. It’s 3:45 am, and I’m not sure if I’m exhausted or adrenalized. I feel like I should sleep, but I’m not sure I want to. I really had such a wonderful time working with these kids. When I’m done with a job, I often tell the client that it was a pleasure working with them, despite the fact that it usually wasn’t. In this case, I couldn’t have been more sincere when I said it. I think I’m going to be a little sad to not go there every night.

But that tends to happen on any theater show I’ve ever worked on. This, too, will pass…

Maybe I’m too hard on myself.

Let me explain a little bit about the industry I’m in. It’s full of bullshit artists. Anybody who gets their hands on some PA equipment and knows how to set it up thinks they are a sound engineer. They’ll learn some key terms, and they’ll talk real big. The average listener will think they sound very intelligent, but the trained listener knows that these people have no clue. Unfortunately, the people who DO have a clue will often sound less intelligent to the average listener because they won’t be throwing around the big terms unnecessarily.

I’m a very insecure person. I don’t think that I’m good at anything. It’s a very rare night that I will walk away from a mix thinking I did a good job. I constantly feel like I have no real skills, and definitely no marketable skills. I’m very self-conscious about the work that I do. I want to impress everyone, especially my peers. I could hear 50 positive comments about the sound at a performance, but if I hear one negative comment, I’m convinced that I didn’t do a good job. If that comment comes from someone who even talks like they know what they’re talking about, it’s even worse.

Tonight I met the man whose job I took at Princeton Day School. He did the sound for a few years prior to my arrival. He didn’t quit. He was fired. So, obviously, he’s not going to be objective when listening to the work I’ve done. But he made a few comments. And they got to me. And then, after talking to me, he made a few comments to the choreographer (who does a lot more than the choreography for the show and who is a good friend and confidant of the director) which I overheard. And this really got to me. And, even though I listened to this man talk and KNEW that he had no clue about anything, I began to get worried. I started to think that maybe this guy did a better job than I did. I needed to go to the director for reassurance. He assured me that what I was doing was 100 times better than it had EVER been at the school, and that he also knew that the previous guy had no clue. Still, there was nagging doubt in the back of my mind…

I can just never be happy with what I do. I wish I could, but every little negative comment really sticks with me. I wish I could say that this insecurity drives me to be better at what I do, but I think it really is just debilitating. I think it causes me to never really be able to take pride in a job well done. It causes me to put myself down and to constantly question the work I’ve done.

I just want to be good at something.

Tonight was opening night of the show. After last night’s preview, I was a bit worried. I kept hearing comments from the director to the effect of, “Well, I think maybe the audience wasn’t really laughing was because they couldn’t really hear everything.” He wasn’t really blaming me…part of the problem is that the orchestra is REALLY loud, but in my mind it translated to, “If those damn sound people would just do their job, we would have been able to hear you and the show would have been good.” We had a few mic problems last night (one of them died right before the show….the lead’s mic, in fact. Fortunately, it wasn’t one of my mics, it was one of the schools, and we caught it during sound check so it wasn’t a problem during the show). Anyway, I was asked to do whatever I could to make things louder, and the director talked with the orchestra conductor to see if he could get the players to be an quieter. Needless to say, I was nervous going into the performance tonight.

It went GREAT! I was ecsatic by the end of the show. You have to understand, I’ve never done a show this large before. The most body mics I think I’ve ever had to deal with at one time was 10 (I think). This show has 23. Plus backstage mics. Plus the orchestra mics (which are only for the video, but they’re something I have to deal with). It’s HUGE. And it went really well. And I’m very happy, and, dare I say it, a little bit proud. There were a few issues that I would like to resolve, and they will be resolved tomorrow (I hope). But overall, it went really, really, really well.

I had an incredibly non-graceful moment at the theater last night. I was sitting on a chair in the theater, putting away all of the microphones with my incredible assistant, Erica. I got up for some reason, and then went to sit down again quickly. I guess the theater seat flipped upwards when I got up, and I didn’t realize it, and when I sat back down, I crashed hard into the floor and my back slammed into the armrest of the chair. I couldn’t breathe for almost a minute. There was a lot of pain in my back. When I got home, I discovered that there was no large bruise, as I was expecting, but I had managed to scrape a good deal of skin off of my back. Now it just hurts. A LOT.

Reviews: Navel Academy – Britney Spears’ Crossroads is sleazy but plain vanilla; Last Orders is an end-of-life road movie; John Q.’s vigilante becomes a liberal.

Only one thing mars the performance: Whenever she sings, the wily showbiz whore takes over.

What a brilliant phrase….”wily showbiz whore”. Beautiful….

Sorry, Alissa. I just haven’t really had much to say, since I’ve mostly been working lately and not much else. Didn’t really want to bother you guys with boring posts…