One Week and Counting

Hello all!
As I was getting ready for work the other night, I realized that we only have about a week of this left. Tomorrow will be our last Sunday performance of the season. It's been a fantastic summer, and I'm going to be sad to have to leave all of my new friends to travel back to Illinois, but this has been an amazing experience for me and I would not have changed it for the world. I have learned so much about what it takes to run the front of house at a large outdoor amphitheatre like the Pioneer. I had never worked front of house before (even at school), except for maybe a little ushering here and there. Now I know that ushering is so much more than showing customers where to sit.

What I mean is...I cleaned up a little kid's vomit a couple of weeks ago. While the show was going on. I caught a scorpion last night and moved it to a safe place away from customers. I have been covered in trash juice more than a couple of times and still skipped back from the dumpsters on the other side of the parking lot. I have cleaned fresh poo off of a toilet seat (that's right, off of the seat of the toilet). I helped clean out the storage sheds behind the gift shop. I have taken broken flags backstage to be fixed. I have given tour after tour after tour of the amphitheatre. I have also given tours of the canyon (not many, but a few)--I decided after a couple of those that I like giving backstage tours better. It's a more intimate group because you're not talking to a whole charter bus full of people at once. I have met people from all over the world. I have a new friend who works at Disney World, Universal Studios doing sound stuff (maybe Disney will be an option next summer?). Who knows?

Okay, so after the list of things that I've already done, here's my goal list for this next week:
Ask Leland if I can run the deck cord. (A deck cord is basically a long rope of fire crackers. It's what we use to make the effect of the lightning bolt every night. Some people know it as a dynamite line. What happens is someone is strapped into a harness, and about ten feet below them, on a rope, they attach the deck cord, and that person literally runs up the wall of the canyon to set it. All it takes to detonate a deck cord is a specific amount of pressure--although I'm not sure exactly what that amount is.) I think this would be fun!

Ride some horses! I haven't gone riding all summer, but I think that will change come Monday!

Learn how to two-step. I've learned how to boot scoot boogie and cotton-eyed joe, but I have yet to learn how to two-step.

Learn how to run the registers in the gift shop. Along with that....learn how to use Ticketsage in the box office.

I think those are all of my goals for now. If anybody can think of any other interesting goals for me to try to accomplish before I leave, that would be awesome. Just let me know! I'll try to post again before the end of next week when I leave.
I hope everyone has had just as amazing of a summer as I have!
~Jen