Everything in my life seems to be made up of “maybes”. I am graduated on June 4 of this year. That is in 10 days. 10 days!! In that short amount of time my high school career will be over. Over. Life as I know it will be done. I will be on my own, going to a college 1000 miles away (literally) and swimming for a team that is literally made of Olympians and American record holders. Some of them have World records. And I am swimming with them. For some reason, the coaches believe that I will be one too. Don’t get me wrong, I believe it too, but right now I’m still a senior in high school. I am also completely terrified.

It’s one thing to say that I’m going to be on my own, but right now it feels like nothing will change. I know college is coming, but I don’t feel like I’m leaving. I have no idea what it’s going to be like living without my friends or familiar teachers, the good ol’ diner a couple miles away, late night bike rides, and also…sniff…my mom. Life without Mom? Yikes! Who’s going to be there when she’s freaking out on what to wear? Who’s going to be there when I’m freaking out on what to where?

But maybe I’ll do it. I’ll live ridiculously far away and actually succeed. Maybe be I will go to the Olympics. Maybe I will become a lighting designer for Keith Urban’s worldwide tour (my current dream job). Maybe I will live without my dad, and maybe even without my mom. Today, however, I’m worried about if I will maybe be able to walk across that stage and shake the Invincible Princible- Mr. D’s hand as he hands me my diploma.

Me? A diploma? Last time I looked, I was getting ready for the 8th grade formal. Next week I’ll be getting ready for my graduation. No maybes about that.

I am a theatre techie, through and through. So I thought that I would start this off with explaining why I fell so in love with such a strange world in so short of a time!

I started theatre almost exactly a year ago, my junior year in high school. I was on costumes crew for the comedy The Skin of Our Teeth. (fantastic play, once you’ve watched it 5 or more times to actually understand it) Being on costumes wasn’t actually the highlight because I didn’t do much, but learning everything else was. Over spring break I was in Pickard (our school’s theatre) all day every day. I learned about props and tools and painting and constructing and just what being a techie entails.

Originally I got into it because my friends and then-boyfriend was in it. Fast forward. Now I’m in it for me! It makes me happy and I finally found my niche in life. My senior year and I’m just figuring it out, but such is life. I’ve moved on from costumes to lights, which is what I want to study in college. I don’t know much yet, in fact I am quite clueless with a lot of things, but the tech directors in Pickard are very understanding and are willing to teach.

…or just steal my camera

What draws me to it? I’m not exactly sure. I do know that it has taught me to do things nobody really wants to do, i.e. painting an entire floor a particularly gross shade of yellow or walking the house at 11 at night. It has also taught me how to be extremely humble. Techies get very, very little credit and they do so, so much work. Way more than people realize. I am a swimmer, a rather good one I like to think, and I’m used to everybody watching me swim and then cheering at me, only me, up on that podium with a medal around my neck. Are there any podiums and medals for techies? No. Do we get a bow in front of hundreds of people? No. We get a flourish of a hand from an ungrateful actor. (No, not all actors are ungrateful, but some are astoundingly ignorant.) But that’s it. When I’m hanging a 20 lb, $500 light 30 feet up in the air I sometimes think, is anybody going to notice this particular light that I am agonizing over? Nope, not one bit. The audience  notices everything as a whole, not really the details or the work put into it.

And the whole of everything is simply magic. Real life magic. I learned that magic does exist. I can help create a suburban home, a brick school, a bar in france with walls that disappear (thank you, scrim), a dusty street in Missouri, and an alley full of cats. Through lights I’ve seen people say it’s so warm or it’s so cold even though the temperature hasn’t changed at all. Behind the set, everything becomes a white and starry world that has no floor, ceiling, or walls. It’s not a stage full of work we make, it’s a made up world that people believe in. It’s the best feeling to have when you look out and see people become entranced in the real life, right in front of their eyes story book playing out, and to know that you helped that happen. Then the lights flare up, they awake and give the actors their due, the fly guy (person who controls the curtains) brings everything down and thus, the techie curtain call.

So, as a little note, I will explain my username, Scrims&Giggles. The last picture is from our last show, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, a comedy written by Steve Martin. At that moment it’s in the “starry” part, but most of the play it’s a bar. At the end of the show the walls needed to disappear and stars would come out. They decided to do that by creating a steel frame and stretching scrim over the top half. Scrim is an intersting thing. It’s fabric-like, kind of like a very fine net. If you shine light on one side you can’t see through it and it looks solid, but if you shine light on the other side it’s transparent, as pictured. Well, as we were velcro-ing the scrim onto the frame, I had the job of cutting off the extra scrim. I cut on the wroooooong side of the frame. BIG MISTAKE. You can’t fix torn scrim. You can’t sew it, glue it, paint it, nothing. It just stays torn, or in my case, cut. Lucky for me, scrim is stretchy. They were able to stretch it over the frame and it looked like nothing had happened. But booooyy was I lucky. That would have ruined to whole set. So they affectionately call me Scrim. If you mess up, they usually call you by what you messed up with. For instance Shackle, he dropped a shackle from the grid, which is 70 ft above the stage. He got down that ladder so fast!

As far as Giggles…well, I laugh a lot.

This is the scrim when you can’t see through it:

…kind of. I never did get a picture of the set in the “bar” mode