Thanks for the reminders, everyone! Here we go.
I worked as a stage tech in a venue all the way through college, doing lighting and sound for whatever events happened to pass through. The hours were whack, the work was hard, my coworkers were crazy, and every shift was a roller coaster. I loved it.Â
One of our big annual events was a drag show fundraiser for the local GSA. It was a fun event, but also a huge amount of work for us, because we had to build them a stage, hang truss for the lights over it, hang lights off the truss, put up speakers on stands and on the truss, and make the whole dang thing light up and pump bass hard enough that the christian youth group holding meetings downstairs would give up and just come watch the show instead.Â
This was our sacred stage tech duty: to crank the bass as loud as they would let us at any given moment, just to feel it rattle our ribcages. Somehow I am still not deaf.Â
Anyway. The problem with all of this was that there was only twelve of us techs, all working part-time, to cover every event in a building with well over a dozen potential venues. In a normal week, that was doable, if precarious. During GSA fundraiser week? Not so much. We were running shifts back to back, hauling gear around the between events, hot-potatoing equipment from location to location at a dead run, occasionally through maintenance hallways and access tunnels we were not supposed to even have access to.
And about three days in to fundraiser week, our elevator broke.Â
Our equipment cage was on the second floor of the building, and the primary venues were on the first and third. No elevator meant that for every shift, we had to carry all our gear up and down the stairs. And if you’ve never worked tech, let me tell you: that stuff is NOT light. Even the crappy gear is built to feel like it will outlast the dinosaurs, and that means it’s heavy. I could deadlift 250 pounds all the way through undergrad, and this job is why. Â
Was I occasionally tempted to go full she-hulk and start throwing steel truss from an upper balcony at passing maintenance staffers until they fixed the elevator? Absolutely. I just didn’t have the time or truss to spare.
We were running on gaff tape and hope, and basically zero sleep.Â
We all still had classes full-time, as well as other jobs and extra-curriculars. I personally had a double design major, two internships ongoing, a spot on the belegarth field to defend, a position on my sorority executive board, an anime con to manage, and a psych prof who was deeply confused about how I was functioning long-term on three hours of sleep a night.
 By the time Friday morning rolled around and prep for the drag show was underway, I was very, very tired, and so were all my coworkers.
The only other person assigned to the drag show was my sole female coworker, because all the guys knew that if they signed up for the shift the queens would make them take their shirts off, and they had mixed feelings about that. (Most of them showed up in the audience and took their shirts off anyway, but whatever.) My coworker and I got things up and running, and were refocusing some of the rainbow spotlights hanging from the truss on the runway. We were dragging this huge A-frame ladder over the stage, running up and down it to tweak the focus.Â
The problem was that the GSA had come through like a swarm of genital faeries, festooning the whole place in a dizzying glut of human reproductive organs.Â
For some reason this was the drag night tradition: they decked out the whole venue in penises and vaginas, like a bachelor party and a hen’s night had been unexpectedly Raptured, leaving all their R-rated decorations behind. There were dildoes suction cupped to the walls. There were big handmade paper vaginas plastered up. I’m talking absolute racks of titties everywhere. There were strings of penis decorations hanging from everything in sight. Including, somehow, our lighting truss. My Ace ass did not quite understand the appeal, but I couldn’t argue with the fact that it did get a lot of attention.Â
So as we moved the ladder very carefully, watching the top to make sure it didn’t get caught in the penis booby-trap hanging from above. And we were both very tired, and a little dizzy from staring into the lights and the glittery dicks, and very busy watching the top of the ladder and not paying any attention to the bottom (which I’m sure the GSA would have objected to).
We completely failed to notice the ladder catching under the leg of one of the tripod speaker stands until it was already teetering at the edge of the stage.Â
My coworker, who was holding that side of the ladder, was too focused on the dickorations, and I was too tired to do anything but react on instinct. I saw the stand, the thousand-odd dollars in audio equipment mounted on it that we desperately needed in order to get through the week–and I just lunged.Â
My coworker insisted later that there had been a moving light on the edge of the stage between me and the speaker, and that I’d jumped over it. I genuinely have no idea if she’s right about that; I only remember reaching desperately as I hurled myself off the stage after the toppling speaker stand.Â
Somehow, probably blessed by the magic of the GSA genital faeries, I wrapped my right hand around the speaker stand mid-air.Â
And then my steeltoe boots hit the floor, and the full weight of a hundred and fifty pounds of falling stand-mounted speakers introduced themselves quite abruptly to my right shoulder. I did not lose my grip.
The speakers did not hit the ground. The dicks remained airborne, untouched by the ladder. The drag show went off gloriously.Â
I spent the remainder of the month forcing my coworkers to do all the heavy lifting for me, because my right arm was Just Not Having It. (And then one of my other coworkers shot himself in the foot and I went back to lifting stuff, because we didn’t have the manpower for two people to be injured at once.) We did all get to keep some glittery didoes, which we snuck into the maintenance staff’s offices until they fixed the elevator.Â
My shoulder has made funny clicky ratchet sounds ever since.Â
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