Facilities Week 2005
The new Town & Gown Players calendar includes several dark periods called "event windows." As soon as the board adopted the schedule, the facilities committee claimed a spring window for a badly needed cleanup, repair and maintenance campaign: Facilities Week. This was not the most inspired title; as it turned out, "X Week" would have been better, reflecting what happened to the big chart of projects.
First thing we did was, in Allen's happy phrase, "move everything out to the middle of the floor." Office supplies, refreshments, props, furniture, soft goods, everything went into the middle of some floor. It had been a few years since we emptied out the scene loft over the stage, and there was a general buildup of crap there. The photo at right shows part of the loft after we'd finished culling, hauling a lot of stuff to a charity store and the landfill, and repacking. Quite a few Town & Gown members are now seeing that back wall for the first time ever.
The box office was pretty well crammed full too, partly with things that belonged there and partly with . . . anything that would fit. We decided to move all the janitorial supplies out and build cabinets to hold them in the front of house restrooms. Lobby space was also being stolen by the supply jugs for the water cooler, and I designed a cabinet to hold more of them in fewer square feet. The image at left shows cabinets at various stages of completion. The standing gray one is for water; you can also see a supply cabinet with door, plus an odd door not yet installed.
Well, I never said the pictures would be exciting.
Some 30 members and others took part, and we had only one serious injury. Speedy claims he heard Rick's warning as "Watch out for the hoe," or something, so he fell into the dry well in the paint shed, cracking a rib or two. The front of house restrooms did not impose such a cost; patching and painting the walls and stripping the floors proved to be perfectly safe activities. At right is a view of the men's side. Just out of sight on the left is a new cabinet replete with toilet paper and light bulbs.
Steve worked wonders as he upgraded the electrical system. Among other things, he replaced broken receptacles and burned-out bulbs throughout the playhouse. The photo at left is a mildly out-of-focus view of the canopy at the main entrance, showing the fairy lights. This is where we opened the proceedings with a grand cookout. The canopy still drips in rainy weather, because the fix that was planned for it involved large sheets of plexiglas but the wind blew a half-gale all week long. Nobody wanted to track a volunteer from the top of a ladder to a landing spot in the next county.
Some of our biggest achievements: cleaning the prop crib, removing a thousand nails and staples from the stage walls, steam-cleaning the carpet, relocating some 150 golf shirts from the box office, installing locks on the refreshment storage cabinets, doing some minor plumbing repairs, painting the box office, giving away those horrid old roll drops from Dearly Departed, and creating a new Second Stage Wall of Fame (in a room that's too small for photography). Nevertheless, a lot of our members will be most deeply impressed by the picture below, showing the dressing rooms in their new dress.
Town & Gown owes its thanks to the couple of dozen people who put in so much time and effort getting the playhouse into good condition again.
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Facilities Week 2005