Now that I am a working girl with a regular 9-5 job, I rarely swing by the old neighborhood where my former job resides. I have offered my help to them in the past, and occasionally when they need an extra person they ask me, and sometimes I follow through and help them out.
I should've known something was going to be terribly wrong about working the Saturday afternoon/evening shift when Carlo called at 10:57pm on Friday night and said "Hey. You're gonna be in for a long night tomorrow."
"How long?" I asked, hoping he only meant an hour or two after the normal clean up and lock up around 10:30pm.
"Um, let's just say...don't make any plans for 4am," he said.
"Seriously? I hate you," I said.
And it turns out he was right. So instead of showing up at 4pm to start my shift, he asked that I come in at 3pm. He had to head to another show, so I was able to take over right away. Getting back into the old groove was not so bad... I (mostly) knew where everything was, I answered the phone like an old pro, and I passed out lots of hugs to anyone and everyone I saw that I used to work with.
But then 3pm became 5pm, and 5pm became 7pm. And the people renting the theatre for the night came in. And they had demands. It was a rock concert sort of gig that evening... full of beer, drunken groupies, fog machines, and plastic spiders (the first band threw them into the crowd. Guess who had to clean them up...).
The first band started almost an hour later than anticipated. The guy running the operation was all, "You know. The show starts when the crowd gets here." No, no, no, my friend. In THEATRE, the show starts 5-10 minutes after it's supposed to, and we shut down the box office about 20 minutes into the show. We don't start the show 55 minutes after originally scheduled, and then keep the box office open all night.
Which is what I ended up doing. Our 3rd house manager also had a miscommunication with my old boss, and so he was not there to help us out. Luckily Indi took care of selling the beer while I held down the fort in the box office. At one point in the evening, I had to head upstairs to the 10:30pm Improv show and sell tickets at their box office. Thank you sooooo much to the awesome people running their show...they know what they're doing, and opened the box office for me because I was running late dealing with stupid people downstairs.
The best part hasn't even happened yet. And I mean it sarcastically when I say "best part." The show finally ended around 11:30/12, but the drunken idiots just hung around while the band packed up their gear. Or tried to pack up. They had music playing through the speakers to help the process along, but that wasn't doing anything, so I quickly had them turn it off. While they were cleaning up their mess on the stage and loading out their equipment, Indi and I were cleaning up beer cans off the theatre floor and throwing out drunken girls. At one point, I kept flicking the house lights on and off, trying to signal that we were closing (because, of course, a verbal request to "get the fuck out" wasn't working), and this one girl with a british accent yells, and I quote, "Are you fucking kidding me? Are they trying to fucking throw us out? I paid $12 fucking dollars to see this band!" May I remind you that at this point, there was no band playing anymore, and they were cleaning up their stuff. Okay, we have that clear? Good.
Finally they migrated to the lobby, but they were still chilling there, waiting for the band members, so I shut off the lobby lights and locked the door that leads to the bathroom. I opened the front door of the theatre and kindly said, "You can wait outside." We had an argument, and I let a couple curses slip. The british accent chick said she was best friends with the band and that she was going to wait inside for them, and I said "You can wait outside like everyone else that left when we asked them to." She said, "But it's cold out there! I don't have a jacket!" I said it wasn't my fault she forgot to take a jacket with her, opened the door a little wider, and gestured for her to get out. Her friend finally pulled her out and gave me a sympathetic (and mostly drunk) look, and I just shook my head at them, locking the door behind them.
This was about 2:35 in the morning by then, and the two guys left packing up the gear were making progress but not a whole lot. While I vacuumed the entire theatre (I know exactly which row pink-wigged fuzzy boa girl sat/partied in), the guys made significant progress in packing up their stuff. It was about 3:15 when everything was packed up and the paperwork was all straightened out. The theatre paid me from 3pm-10pm, but the renters (according to contract) paid me $25/hr overtime from 10pm-3am. The extra money was worth it, and I definitely earned it (insert me kneeling on the theatre floor in what I realized later was a puddle of beer, picking up half empty beer cans and not realizing they were spilling on me).
Indi and I grabbed a train together, and I finally got home at 4:30 in the morning, finally falling asleep at 5am and not waking up again until noon. Of all the times I've been associated with that theatre, I was appalled to be associated it that night (with that event). There have been many times I was proud to say I worked at an off-broadway theatre, but that night was one of the worst ever. I have never been at the theatre that late for a production, and I have never dealt with more drunken stupid people than I had that night.
Also, I've learned a lesson: next time I'm asked to work at the theatre, I'm going to ask just what the hell is going on that night before I accept the offer.
Goodnight. <3
