HEC weekend, Lighting 101 (Friday)

On the second day of HEC, my manager gave to me, two set up shifts and a free dinner at employee dining.  The way my schedule worked out this semester, I have no afternoon classes except for rock climbing on Mondays.  I was, therefore, completely free to work an afternoon shift at HEC on Friday.  I arrived at Cornell Productions (CP) headquarters to set up the pre-dinner cocktail (as opposed to the post-dinner cocktail, which I also set up for).

For the pre-dinner cocktail, I mainly hauled around some lights and gaffed the wires, but I did also learn how to set up bar lighting.  It’s not horribly difficult . . . which is probably a good thing, because I was asked to light the bar by myself on Saturday night.  For smaller bar setups, you take two of our smallest lights and clamp them to the back corners of the table.  Point each light diagonally across the table, and that’s about it.  After that, depending on the room, you may or may not have to run ridiculous lengths of extension cords halfway across the room to power your lights.  Once you’re made sure there aren't any blatant tripping hazards, cover the orange.

After we packed up and disappeared, we took our dinner break at employee dining.  Regular dining hall food at Cornell is already pretty good, but Statler-made food takes it up another level.  They had some version of shepherd’s pie sans reconstituted mashed potatoes and questionable meat products often found in school cafeteria lunches, beef (not sure what the dish was called), coleslaw, and desserts.

It’s kind of my joke that I eat meals so I can have dessert, and not only was this meal fancier than just about anything I’d eaten in the past, oh, year or so , but it also ended with chocolate peanut butter pie.  (Keep in mind I've been eating in dining halls and at home, where meals consist of a) whatever you can find in the fridge, or b) white rice, stir fried vegetables, and a rotation of approximately 5 and a half meat dishes.  For the record, I still like eating at home and in the dining halls.)  As much as I like peanut butter, peanut butter and chocolate together in a dessert is getting to my idea of the ideal dessert.  So I was pretty happy when I returned to CP headquarters to do homework.

My second shift of the day was setting up the post-dinner cocktail.  After running back and forth between the event location and headquarters 3 or 4 times to pick up forgotten equipment, I was set to making sure half a dozen tables scattered around the room had power.  For this event, the designer wanted a dance club atmosphere with lights under the tables.  The tables all had a covering that reached the floor, so when the lights were placed underneath them, it created a softened, glowing table effect.

Naturally, the next step after getting all the wires and lights set up was gaffing everything. At this point, not only were we running out of tape, but we were a little short on wires. As in, we ended up shoving several dozen feet of a coil of wire underneath a table because we didn't have a shorter extension cord. Besides the fact that you could see the coil glowing orange when the light was on and we had to gaff the entire thing with white tape, it worked. I also managed to secure the better part of one wire before I realized that the plugs connecting the extension cord to the light would be right in the middle of the floor. I finished it up anyway . . . and had to redo it ten minutes later. We ran a final check of the room, making sure all the lights were on and there were no loose wires, and performed our usual disappearing act. Before we left, however, we did get to see the final products of our labor, and I have to say, it looked pretty cool. No pictures though, because it takes two hands to tear gaff tape.