[SML] Cleaning the audience space

[Paul Guncheon]

Don't use blowers, they suck... ummm wait. There is a story coming. I'll
make it short though.

I designed and built a show in a smallish theater that was set in a 3/4
view or thrust position, i.e. seating on three sides of the stage.  The set
consisted of about fifty to seventy-five tree trunks, a bunch of bushes,
and assorted foliage, grass, and stones. We had sculpted a forest floor
with a lot of flat-ish rocks sculpted out of Homesote and Canec (like
Homesote but softer and made with sugar cane stalks) by the use of
grinders, sanders, and what all. This, as one might imagine, made a LOT of
dust. Quite a bit of debris went into the seating.

The night before the first preview the cleaning crew came in and for some
reason, decided to use leaf blowers as part of their procedure to clean the
seating. They had never done this before. When we came in the next morning
to put stuff away as the set was finished, we discovered that the entire
set was covered in dust and dirt. Everything was brownish grey.

But the seating was clean.

Grrr.

We spent the next many hours patiently vacuuming up the dust (Do you have
any idea how long it takes to vacuum a bush?) and replacing the dirt where
needed. The cleaning crew was "cautioned" by management (at the kind and
gentle urging of the TD, my partner in building the set) to never use
blowers again.

Of course, this didn't prevent them from, many months later, cleaning up
the artfully placed "litter" from a punk nightclub set. We proceeded to
replace and hot glue every piece of trash back onto the set.

We live, we learn.

Laters,

Paul 1
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