Last week my son walked me through a Zoom meeting so we could review a document together. He’s in grad school, and all his classes have moved online; he’s a pro. And a patient teacher.
As the manager of a concert venue that has gone dark, there is precious little work I can do from home. So I had been spared video conferencing up to that point, but I finally got a taste of the hellscape all my professor friends have been talking about. A nightmare, indeed. Not the tech part—the seeing-your-wrinkles part.
Two years ago one of my stage managers left our stalwart crew after spring break to “focus on academics.” At our first meeting after the break, we welcomed the new kid.
I introduced this fella, and then, as an icebreaker thingy, suggested we share a fun nugget about our families. To get the ball rolling, I told them about my great Aunt Minnie, the sharpshooter who killed her husband.
“How did she kill him? Did she shoot him?!”
“No. They had an argument in the kitchen, and she happened to be peeling potatoes when it got out of control.”
“She killed him with a potato peeler?!”
“Just a regular knife.”
And then I told them about how Aunt Minnie was under house arrest for twenty years, and the day her sentence was up, she put on her nicest dress and walked straight to the liquor store.
I don’t know if that’s true. But it’s the story I’ve heard.
Remember. Ice breaker. Just trying to get things rolling.
There was a silence, and then:
“NICOLE. WE CAN’T FOLLOW THAT.”
But they did.
STUDENT #1: Violinist who reminds you of your eccentric uncle. Frequently confused:
“My grandpa almost blew up the Golden Gate Bridge!”
“That sounds like a good story!”
“But it’s not the one I’m going to tell!”
But it’s the one we all wanted to hear. I forget what he actually told us.
STUDENT #2: Quiet, competent, brilliant pianist who appears to prefer no one talk to her:
“I don’t have any interesting stories. But my great grandmother was a spy during WWII.”
“For… us…?”
“No,” she deadpanned. “For the Germans.”
“WHAT.”
“I’m kidding. OF COURSE SHE WAS A SPY FOR US.”
STUDENT #3: This young woman did not speak her entire first year until one day in May, we walked into the storage-slash-backstage-meeting room and found that all heck had broken loose. The strike after the opera evidently had not gone well.
Student: “Well. To be honest? It was a real shit show here yesterday.”
I stood in shocked silence, and then this darling student whispered, “We could just open the windows and chuck everything right on out.” Her family story ran as such:
“Well. My dad’s dad’s… grandpa… I think… was left as a a baby in a basket on the steps of a church. In Italy. They called him ‘the royal boy’ at the orphanage, because whoever left him had also left cash to provide for his education, with enough left over for him to buy a house.”
STUDENT #4: Lead stage manager, all business, super smart high achiever: “My grandfather was a king in his province in western India. And then the revolution came, but he couldn’t openly support it, because, well, Britain. So he started a watch company as a front, and behind the scenes was slipping money to the revolutionaries.”
That was a pretty good meeting.
Confession: I do not miss my work. I’ve always valued the people over the performance. A fatal flaw.
But, gosh, I miss my crew.