The Art of Folding Tarps

watch out for Russian bears - take time to sit on beach - use tarp folding methods on bed sheets for a neater linen closet

Adelaide was an interesting city. I lived on the beach, literally. My house was just behind the sand dunes and the living room was always filled with sand. Great place to live.

The air came onto the porch minted fresh in the Antarctic. I’d sit on the beach at night, look at the ocean and think about the South Pole. I decided I wanted to go there, this last wilderness, the dangerous trek, but I never did.

My friend Martin got me a job working at the Moscow State Circus as an electrician. We showed up in a field and after an hour the trucks showed up as well. We set the whole circus up from dirt field to selling pop corn in eight hours. Incredible.

The crew chief was a guy named Tony Sparrow and he taught me how to fold a tarp. It’s an art. Later, I worked some other jobs where I had to fold tarps. I always knew what to do. Tony made me a master tarp folder.

Before Tony Sparrow did that however, he had me put fluorescent lights up in the bear tent. I had to go into the bear tent before there was light, my only of experience being in the dark with four Russian bears. Bears don't like fluorescent light, in case you're wondering. When I finally switched on the lights this one bear gave me a pissed-off bear look and snapped at me in bear growl. I was happy to get back to hauling 3-ought cable all over the field.

A circus tarp is a big tarp. It covers the entire area where the ring is set. It took about eight people to unfold it and eight people to fold it up again.

At baseball games they use a big crew for giant tarps. Tarp action is what makes rain delays fun, and I always make sure I’m in my seat to watch and learn, but we had a different goal with our circus tarp. We had to fold ours into a square to pack it into a truck.

Here’s Tony’s great tarp folding secret.

“You don’t fold it in half, you fold it in thirds.”

Anybody who’s ever worked in theater has some beloved method of tarp folding, but Tony was so precise in his technique, I can produce a neatly folded tarp every time. It works for bed sheets as well.

Here’s video of tarp surfing. I’m not sure what’s the point of tarp surfing, but I can help them fold it up when they’re done.

Keep The 'What the . . . ?'

make sure you don’t have a clue – find others who are just as ignorant – get to work

I took this job at an advertising agency called DDB. Now this was a big deal for me because it represented a seismic shift in the direction I’d been taking my life, which was live production of theater, concerts, festivals, circuses, you name it. I’d worked thousands of live shows and I absolutely loved the work, the pressure, the results, but my daughter was a wee one and I couldn’t see missing every birthday, holiday and weekend because I was working.

Theater was a single person’s world and I wasn’t single. I needed some stability and a steady paycheck and with a little networking that became DDB. I may be the only person in the world that considered a switch to the advertising industry a move to a more stable environment, but back stage at rock and roll shows was the wild west, so an office on Madison Avenue struck me as the height of a genteel existence.

I didn’t have a clue who or what DDB was; I didn’t know a thing about advertising, its history or even what an ad was. DDB was like the Taj Mahal of creativity, I’d just never heard of the place. Looking back on it, I’d say that worked in my favor and taught me the value of naivety, or is that naivete. Doesn’t matter. It turned out not knowing what was going on was a solid way to function in such a complicated place and get creative results.

My job when I began was to produce advertising music. First day on the job they gave me dozens of reels and said listen to these, these are the companies we use. Okay, I listened. And listened. And listened. I didn’t get it. I’d been in music since I was eight years old but this was unlike any music I’d ever heard before. I didn’t recognize the forms, the tempos, the beats, the ideas, the words, it all seemed weird to my ears. What kind of music was this? What vibe did it fit? I just didn’t understand it and decided it was some sort of sub-genre I’d completely missed in my music education. Jingles.

And the budgets. I spent more on a thirty second piece of music for an aspirin commercial than I did producing Cosi Fan Tutti, complete with thirty musicians, lights, sets and an entire cast of opera singers. It was insane.

Being Mr. Popular never seemed the way to get high levels of creative done, and I quickly became an anathema to the established jingle companies in NYC, but I also inadvertently moved the bar for what a jingle was by simply applying basic laws of the song writing universe to ads and hiring new writers for the jobs; it was fun and crazy. At one point we produced the Kit Kat jingle straddling the toilet in this young composer’s loft. He didn’t have a clue what a ‘jingle’ was, but he wrote one hell of a catchy tune in his bumping around in the dark approach.

We did dozens of tunes in the next ten years with untried talent, and I always strived to wander into areas I hadn’t a clue how to function in. I’m still doing it. Keeps you fresh. Beginner’s mind. Never lose it.

Wear Shoes

don’t stare at man under bed – pick glass out of foot – beg for leather

Edenvale Hospital was a big, sprawling hospital east of Johannesburg, South Africa, all shiny and nice and well kept and busy, but it wasn’t Edenvale Hospital my mother took me to that day. It was Invisible Edenvale Hospital, hidden behind the big hospital, a sort of sub-hospital, out of sight, back there behind the pine trees, where it couldn’t be seen, a semi-secret hospital no more than rows of Quonset huts, half the size of the big buildings out front, but with twice the patients. So many patients in fact, people slept three to a bed, under beds, on gurneys, in the hallways or just sprawled on a floor. It was chaos, run by six Irish nuns, who worked as hard as anybody worked, sleeves rolled up, scurrying back and forth, begging for medical supplies, doctors, medicines anything they could get their hands on to help with the endless tide of broken bones, cuts, gashes, stab wounds, cancers, aches and pains that staggered, hobbled, crawled and fell through their doors every day.

My mother wanted to help. She wanted to do anything she could to aid this small cadre of over-worked nuns, and they had a specific request for her; shoes, any size, make, model, as many as she could get. You set someone like my mother on a task like that and step back. You want shoes? You’re going to get shoes.

To understand the need for shoes, you need to understand the township of Alexandria. What do I remember? Millions of people, Africans, Indians, families, gangs, hunger, dirt, corrugated iron roofs, cardboard walls, poverty, drugs, danger, exhilaration, chaos. And a lot of folk walking barefoot and getting glass in their feet, so many people that it was the number one injury treated at the hospital. Hence, the shoe drive.

I don’t remember the mechanics of this effort, posters, pleas, preaching from pulpits, none of that; I just remember driving round in my old beat up Morris station wagon, piling shoes into the trunk then driving over to the hospital, laying them out in rows and watching people pick over them looking for the right pair. Man, we must have gotten thousands of shoes over to that hospital. It went on for days. You want to save world, do big things, shake and rattle the days and nights, but sometimes all it takes is a pair of shoes, worn out, tossed aside, looking for a home.

Do The Impossible Thing

- learn enough Chinese to say hello – carry Ming Cho Lee set model from NYC to Boston – weep

Back in the eighties, right out of college, I had this job with the Opera Company of Boston. I did about twenty productions with the company over a five-year span, but one production topped them all. Turandot. The artistic director of the opera company was Sarah Caldwell, a gigantic, hypnotic, boiling caldron of talent and raw attitude. Turandot was the incredible collaboration of hundreds of people on two continents. It took someone like Sarah to pull it off.

Ming Cho Lee was the designer, the Beijing Opera supplied the costumes and props (and martial arts training) Eve Marton sang the lead, and all that, my friends, became production beyond production.

The opera house in Boston was this old vaudeville theater from the nineteenth century modeled on the Paris Opera. It was classic east coast plaster palace; a dripping, flaking, smelly, dirty, sprawling auditorium of pure magic, filled with ghosts and transparent shadows of top hats and feather boas floating through the dark corridors. Working for the opera meant moving in and spending at least two weeks round the clock. We slept on piles of hemp and ate meals in the Grand Foyer. The outside world disappeared as we crafted Sarah’s incredible schemes.

Lee was possibly the most dynamic designer I ever worked with. His sets were simple, massive, breath-taking; a giant wall, a stunning palace. The costumes and props from Beijing were delicate, masterful, flowed across the stage in swirls of red and gold silks. And it all came down to this:

The emotional palette of Puccini in his prime, the lights dimmed, the curtain rising, the audience stunned, me standing in the back of the theater, exhausted, excited, watching our work appear and then Eva Marton, a small figure, beautiful, crowned, enters atop Lee’s wall and begins to sing.

Standing in back of the audience on opening night, a chilly wave of emotion swept up my spine when I realized I’d participated in a massive, complex, powerful, wrenching, beautiful, delicate, expansive, wall rattling expression pure art.

The basic idea is to weep, change your world, bring yourself to your knees, max out the commitment, bet your soul and strip your flesh to the bone. You don’t make it every time, I know you don’t make it every time, but what’s the point of ever putting pen to paper, note to stave, lips to horn, fingers to strings, chisel to stone, brush to canvas if you don’t plan on making the best damn attempt at something original, memorable and downright extraordinary as you possibly can? The thing that seems impossible; that’s exactly the thing to do.

Sing Into The Dragon's Mouth

- learn to survive on coffee - work like a plough horse - bring ink

I'm going to do this from memory, because it was so long ago. I was still a teenage, living in Johannesburg, South Africa, the nation still caught in the spit and bile of apartheid and I was looking for a job, any job that got me closer to the wondrous music of the townships and the crazy buzz of theater.

I found both. Not sure how. Probably saw a notice on a bulletin board.

I was enrolled in the University of Witwatersrand at the time, in the Anthropology department, but I never really took to the place or the study or the discipline. There was an exciting world out there and I wanted to get to it. Cliche, I know, but the truth all the same.

Downtown in the Jo'burg, I walked up a narrow flight of stairs and stepped into the upside down world of Dorkay House. The Phoenix Players were putting on a show called Phiri!; crazy show, African musicians, dancers, sets, band, wild, passionate, over the top, directed by Barney Simon. I signed on as a production assistant, which was jump-in-the-deep-end-of-the-pool time. If I didn't know what I was doing, I learned my first lesson in high-pressure dead-line production. Fake it until you figure it out. Theater production is a lot of adapting to different stages, different performances, different ideas, moods, vibes, tempers and talent, so adapt or perish. Useful lesson that.

My very first day on the job I was sent up to Pretoria, the capital city, about a fifty mile drive north. In Pretoria, I needed to secure permissions for the African cast of Phiri to be in Jo-burg to do the show. We were putting it on at Wits, the university. This was my very first task in theater and I was determined to get it right.

What I soon discovered was that there were acres and acres of rules, regulations and forms in Afrikaner run South Africa. Afrikaners seemed to relish it all, the bureaucracy, orders, procedures, signs, directions, laws, codes, all wrapped in an arcane language, guaranteed to lead to mundane and constant violations. I knew I had to be careful and precise, not exactly my long suit, then or now.

I went to a room and waited on line, and then followed a police officer to another room and a stack of forms were put in front of me. I was told to fill them out. I had the names and info in my pocket and I spread it all out in front of me. As he was leaving, the police officer, tall, close cropped hair, tight, fit, mean looking son of a bitch, told me to fill them out in triplicate. No copier, nothing. He wanted me to fill out each form three times in ink.

"Make it neat," he said, as he left me there.

That's it, that's my introduction to a lifetime of theater, opera, TV, music, you name it, I've produced it all, but it began back in Pretoria, South Africa, me sitting alone in a big room for hours, painstakingly filling out form after form, in ink, no mistakes allowed or I had to start again. I don't think they even checked them and the policeman gave me a sneer when I dropped the stack on his desk.

"Why'd those Bantu want to put on a show?" he said.

I didn't know what to say, I really didn't. I was a week or two past my eighteenth birthday, alone in the middle of a marble maze of a hard core nasty volk and I just wanted to get the hell out of there.

"You should come," I said and turned and left. I didn't run, but when I got back to the car my hands were shaking. No reason, no threats, but something about it unnerved me. I remember it to this day.

Phiri! was an incredible hit. We played it in Jo'burg, then took it to some townships. Striking and adopting the sets for the different township theaters was an amazing lesson in how to make sets work on different stages. It was a big show, maybe twenty singers, a corp of dancers, a big band, lights, sets, sound, costumes, props, a real deal Broadway level production. I loved it. We worked like dogs. Perfect. I was totally in love with theater, production, the work, hard and long, all of it. I was home.

In the townships, I experienced something I never heard again. When the curtain went up, the audience was noisy, commenting on the show, the story, discussing the merits of this singer or that dancer, talking directly to the cast as they performed. To this day, I've never seen more audience participatory performances than I did all those years ago in the African townships. The theater was vital, important, real, connected to the audience in ways most productions can only dream. And it was more than even that.

In the daily horror of the apartheid era, when the oppression was like a steel collar around the throats of entire nations of peoples, the cast of Phiri sang and danced their way past the jack boots and lifted the hearts of so many, night after night.

Right from the beginning of my life in production, I learned the most valuable lesson of all. Connect to your audience. Make it mean something. Change your world and theirs. And if the work you're doing doesn't achieve that, then it's probably not worth doing.