Beaten down by Shanghai

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Okay, so its 11pm here and I started my day at 6am... combine that with 12 hour jet lag and you'll get an idea of where I am starting from. To then get a feel for where I am finishing, imagine spending much of your entire summer preparing to take a tour to another country, putting in lots of hours thinking about how to make it wonderful, persevering through hours long skype conversations, and generally just working your ass off. Then imagine that the first day you walked in the theater, you had to throw all of that out and start from scratch.

The producers of this show screwed me hard today, and in a way that means the show is not only going to be far less interesting to look at than it was supposed to be, but that I am going to have to work far harder to reach that sub-standard level than I should... not just this week, but the entire time we're here. For those of you who speak lighting geek, the show that was written for an ETC Element/Ion console was going to be converted to run on a Pearl console, which was going to be brutal, but then today that plan got thrown out and now it has to run on an ETC Express 48/96. With moving lights. For those of you who don't speak lighting geek, this is approximately equivalent to being told that you're going to drive in a Formula 1 race, then being told later that you'll be driving a NASCAR vehicle, then showing up at the track and being handed the keys to a Chevy Chevet with no power steering and a broken radio.

Plus I broke the lens on my camera today, dammit.

My spirit was broken around 3pm or so, and since then I have just been coasting. We ended up getting the show mostly focused tonight, but I have to go back in for a day that will in all likelihood be at least as frustrating tomorrow. Then on the 6th they want me to go focus a show for the 7th, then come back and run this one, then finish moving in on the 7th and do that one. Don't expect much here the next 3 days, since it will be all I can do to get these shows up and running.

Okay... I'm sitting in the corner of the coffee shop looking sad and falling asleep, so its time to head for bed.

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