The Year in Review - May 2008

Okay...

So, I realized that I had actually already written a review of March and April previously, so here is May. June will follow tomorrow!

May: I returned to Oxford just in time for finals. Easy week. I had learned that I was going to be losing one student who was changing majors but I would also be gaining one. One of the challenges that I have faced in my job at Ole Miss has been the lack of students. When I took the job I thought that I was going to have three students which would be the base of the program while I built it up. However, upon arrival there was only one left. One had decided that she had had enough of designing in school, had already gone through two professors (her first being the man who had been there for 30 years, the second the interim prof who had been there during the search), and wasn’t really interested in a third. The second had dropped out to go work at the Hard Rock in Biloxi. The one that remained had had an unfortunate history in the department and I was warned that he was unreliable. By the end of the first semester he was making excellent strides, we had worked out our differences and he was coming along nicely. However, after failing one class in the department for the fourth time he decided that he would be changing majors after the spring. So, I was once again left with one student looking ahead to the next academic year. He had just showed up one day, had had experience in high school and wanted to learn more. I was excited to have him while being disappointed about losing the other.

Just before I left Nashville the director of The Underpants had offered me a gig designing the inaugural season of The Tennessee Shakespeare Festival. They would be doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream and it would be outdoors. I happily accepted the offer and went to work trying to figure out what we could do. Being the inaugural season there was no infrastructure in place and things were very much up in the air. The budget fluctuated on several occasions. Initially, there was going to be a permanent installation of power which I had given specifications on. Then that fell through and I had to learn more about diesel powered generators than I ever wanted to know. In the interim I had sent off requests for quotes for what I was wanting for the design. One company came back and said, we can’t supply that much equipment. Another came back with a quote that was three times larger than my budget. Luckily Stage Light was wonderful and came back with a quote within budget and saved me the headache of how to design the show with a third of the instrumentation that I already considered the bare minimum necessary to design the show. It was a stressful time, with many conference calls regarding power, budget and scheduling. More on the show in June!