Allen Zadoff - Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can't Have

I am Adam Ziegler, Techie. Capital T.

My best friend Reach calls us Crewus technicalis . Like we’re some rare species.

But to the actors we’re just techies, kids in black who hand them a prop or hold a penlight to guide them offstage. We’re invisible, filling the cracks around them like grout between beautiful bathroom tiles.

There’s a click on my headset.

“I think Derek’s accent changed from British to Scottish,” Reach says.

I free one hand, key the microphone.

“And there’s some stiffness in his pantaloons,” I say. “What do you think it means?”

“It means there are females in the vicinity.”

“Females? I had no idea.”

“Of course not. You’re having a love affair with light.”

“You got light, what else do you need?”

“Human beings,” Reach says.

“Overrated,” I say.

“Let’s respect protocol on the radio,” a voice says in my ear. It’s our stage manager, Ignacio. You’re supposed to announce yourself when you get on headset, but Ignacio loves to creep on without anyone knowing. He’s sneaky like that.

Reach says. “Are you off your meds, Ignacio?” Ignacio has ADHD, which makes it tough to have a conversation with him, but makes him a great stage manager. I guess split focus is helpful in a job where you deal with a thousand things at once.

“I took my pill this morning!” Ignacio says. “And I expect you both to act like professionals.”

“We are professionals,” Reach says, “but it’s a load-in for God’s sake, not the Kennedy Center Honors.”

“Chain of command,” Ignacio says.

That’s his favorite phrase in the world. Probably because he’s very near the top of the chain.

“You’re right,” I say. “Apologies, Ignacio. From both of us.”

Reach coughs and says “suck-up” at the same time. You never cough into your mic. It’s rule one of headset etiquette. Reach knows the rules better than anyone. He loves rules, but he also loves to bust Ignacio’s balls.

I’m not a suck-up. I’ve just got plans. Things I want to do.

Shows I want to light.

I want to be a lighting designer. Too bad Derek has that job on lockdown. He’s been working for two and a half years to design a big show, and our director, Mr. Apple, finally gave him the chance.

Now that he’s ascended, there’s not much room for me.

Derek was a legend long before I got to this school. His dad is Thomas Dunkirk, world-famous architect, on the boards of museums and arts organizations from New York to London. Derek keeps promising his dad will come to school to do a seminar or something, but so far, nobody has every met the guy. We’ve only seen him on TV.

You’d expect a kid like Derek to be at private school. I mean, Montclair is an amazing place, but it’s still a public school. Someone once asked Derek why he was here, and he said his father wanted him to be a real American boy, fit in with the plebes, so to speak, so he refused to send him away.

Lucky us.

On top of that, Derek’s accent has a magical effect on women. When he speaks, they laugh at his jokes and their eyes widen. If I’d known an accent was so powerful, I might have worked on one while I was in eighth grade. I could have arrived at high school two years ago with a cool foreign identity. Instead I came in as The Guy Whose Dad Just Died. Some people could work the angles on that, get some pity love. Postmortem poon , as Reach calls it. But the idea makes me feel sick. Anyway, I couldn’t talk to girls before Dad died; I didn’t magically gain a new skill set after the funeral.

“Stay focused,” Ignacio says as if he can read my mind. “Especially you, Z. Last I looked, you were twenty feet in the air.”

More like twenty-five, but Ignacio’s right. You don’t want to be daydreaming when you’re up in the air straddling a pipe.

“Will do,” I say. “Z out.”

I take a final glance at the girls, then I crack my knuckles and get down to business.

I shift my balance towards the pipe, pull a wrench from my belt, and lock down the C-clamp on the closest Leko. I attach a safety cable and double-check it.

It’s not easy to do lights from the catwalk because I have to hang over the front in a scary way. But I’ve developed my own system. It saves a lot of time because I don’t have to bring in a lift or keep moving a ladder around.

I finish the Leko and move down the line. Twenty-five lights down, fifteen to go.

That’s the process. We load in the lights. Then we focus. Then we dry tech. Then the actors join us and it really gets interesting.

I look across the grid at the instruments waiting to be hung. I think about the type of light each one throws. The soft fuzz of the Fresnel, the tight focus of the Leko, the bright wash of the PAR can. Then there are the gels—translucent colored sheets placed in front of the lights to change the color of the beam. I love setting up lights. Cold metal in the air is all potential, like stepping outside right before dawn when you know the world is about to change.

Reach is right about one thing: I spend a lot of time thinking about light, and it’s not my job. As a techie, I don’t need to think about light in general. I need to think about a light—the one I’m working on. I’m supposed to follow the lighting plot and mind my own business. A lighting plot is a map, shapes on a piece of paper telling me where to hang and how to focus and color each light, but when I look at the plot, it’s like the lights are already turned on in my head.

As I glance at it now, it seems like Derek has made a design error. There’s a dead area just left of center, a wide swath of shadow. Derek thinks there’s plenty of light there because he’s hanging nearly everything that exists in the school. It’s his first show as a production designer, and he wants it to be the greatest debut in history. Even though the play is A Midsummer Night’s Dream , he’s designed it like a stadium rock concert—crazy set pieces, wild costumes, and a ton of metal in the air.

While it’s true that there will be plenty of light onstage, in this center left area at least you won’t be able to see the actors’ faces. And it’s strange thing about light in the theater—if you can’t see the actors’ faces, you can’t hear them very well. It’s like your ears need your eyes or they get confused.

I should say something to Derek, but I won’t. Derek is the reigning king of theater, and you don’t get on the king’s good side by telling him how to do his job. In fact that’s a good way to end up teching the actors’ toilets.

Just then Derek comes back onstage with the actors in tow. Wesley struts in front of the pack, trying to stay close to Derek.

“Please mind the gap,” Derek says. “I don’t want any of you lovely ladies to hurt yourselves on my set.”

“Be careful, ladies,” Wesley says, parroting him.

There’s a female actor I don’t know at the very back of the pack, standing with the extras. She’s not looking at Derek. She’s looking up at the lights. Up towards me.

That’s weird because actors rarely look up. Maybe the very first time they walk into the theater freshman year, but after that, the theater itself becomes invisible. And light? They don’t care where it’s coming from. They just want to make sure it’s on them.

But this actor is looking everywhere, examining things. I’ve never seen her before, or maybe I haven’t noticed her.

I notice her now.

She has long black hair and the most beautiful eyes. I can’t see if they’re blue or gray from here, but I think they’re the kind of eyes that change color depending on the light that hits them. I get this fantasy in my head. I’m a character in a musical, a fascinating character with a troubled past. I slip down the nearest pipe and the characters freeze in place onstage, all of them except the girl with black hair. She steps out and I walk over to meet her. We don’t speak right away. As the music swells, we recognize something in each other, some shared pain.