MacGyver Lights

This weekend, I lived my own worst nightmare.

Friday night, I got to the theatre after a very long work day. I was one sleepy girl, but I had a Coke in my bag. Saved again by the pretty red can.

I turned on my dimmer check to make sure all my lights were functioning. They were. I turned them off again and went to mop up the water that had leaked through the roof during our rainstorm. I set my props. I diluted my tar. All was well.

The actors warmed up. I went to turn on the pre-show lights and... it looked weird. Weird and dark. I asked Sean, "Does this look weird?" He agreed that it looked very weird. 2/3rds of my lights weren't on. Ten minutes from curtain and they just don't work.

The adrenaline started to kick in as I was furiously checking plugs, turning things off and back on again, swearing under my breath, trying to call our lighting designer, etc. I wasn't tired anymore.

Nothing worked.

Could we fake it? I'd be the one to do the faking and I wasn't completely convinced that I could pull it off, but as they say, "The show must go on." Particularly when you've got a jam-packed house. With every muscle in my body clenched, I took a deep breath and told Sean I was ready to go.

The audience was extremely friendly and fore-warned about out "technical difficulties" and the show started pretty well. Sean came into the booth and offered to run the work lights to fill in the lights we were missing. It wasn't great, but it wasn't god-awful either.

A couple of the actors didn't even know anything was wrong, but they're the ones that drink before the show. (I'm kidding. Kind of.)

The actors pulled off a truly fantastic performance and we all went out for a really big drink after the show.

Mary, our lighting designer, went in on Saturday to see if she could figure out what was wrong. No dice. She tweaked the few lights that were there and fixed a couple of things that were REALLY wrong. The work lights filled in for us again on Saturday night and our beyond-full house.

The electrician came in yesterday morning and Sean and Mary took a look at the whole thing. A transformer was unplugged. Yup, that's it. Unplugged. One plug.

Thank God it was that simple and all is back to normal.

After Friday's show, one of our patrons complimented me on my MacGyver lights. Hence the title of the post.