//------------------------------// // April 24 [Light Shop] // Story: Silver Glow's Journal // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------//  April 24 It was chilly and the sun wasn't up when I woke up. I'd gotten used to the fact that everywhere I'd been sleeping was heated, so I wasn't used to it anymore. The only solution was to stick my head under the covers and snuggle up as tightly against Aric as I could. He'd told me that when he went on the road trip he and David and Angela all had to cuddle up in the back of the truck to keep warm, and now I knew why. And I bet it was at least a decigrade warmer than it had been over Spring Break. He woke up as soon as I moved and hugged me against him and then said that he hadn't expected it to get this cold overnight. He said he could turn on Winston and we could sit in the cab and warm up, but I thought that would be wimping out and I said that if he was okay with the chill I was okay with it too. We both dozed but didn't really get much more sleep at all. When the dawn was finally breaking over the trees I nuzzled his cheek and then tugged at his pants with my hind leg (he was still wearing his clothes because of the cold) and he got the idea and it wasn't too long before the blankets all managed to get pushed off but we didn't mind. There was a trick to getting out of the back of Winston easily which I couldn't manage. Aric had to push the glass back window up and then reach over the edge to get the handle, which was recessed too far for a hoof to pull. When he finally got it, the tailboard crashed down and he slid out and went off to water a tree. He’d told me that the French word latrine came from 'le tree,' because that's what you peed on when you were in the woods. I found my own tree on the other side of the clearing where I could still see him but not too close because some stallions were weird about that and I thought maybe boys were too. It would have been fun to spend the rest of the day in the clearing, but we didn't have any food at all, so we got in the truck and drove back to Kalamazoo and went to Nina's because that was his favorite place to have breakfast and I liked it too. I asked him what he wanted to do for the rest of the day and he said that he ought to be finishing the diorama for his set design class but he could always do that later. And he said that he did have to fix some theater lights because there was an upcoming play in the black box theatre that he was doing lights for and he really wanted to use the Berkeys because they had irises in them but all of them put out shit for light and no one could ever get them to focus and he wasn't sure why. So we wound up going to the light shop together so he could work on them. There were a couple of tall stools (which wasn't comfortable for a pony at all) and a cabinet full of the special bulbs that the lighting instruments took and cables all over the walls and big flat drawers full of colored plastic which he said were gels and used to make the light a different color. There was enough room on the workbench for me to sit there and watch as he took one of the Berkeys apart and started inspecting it. They didn't have a lot inside them; there was a tube which had the lenses and then a slot where the iris was and another slot where you could put a thing called a gobo which made a pattern in the light, and there were also shutters that blocked off some of the light. He explained what all that was as he took it apart. When he didn't find anything in the main body he got out a screwdriver and started taking the lens train apart to see if that was where the problem was. When he got it open he studied them and pointed to little marked slots where they could go—he said that one of the cleverest things about the Berkeys was that you could move where the lenses were to change the angle of light coming out of them, so it really took the place of several different lighting instruments and then he showed me by pulling one of them out of the forty slot and putting it in the fifty slot and sort of drew with his finger how the light would come into the first lens and then be bent into the second and midway through he stopped and just started laughing and picked up the frontmost lens and turned it around. He said no wonder they couldn’t be focused; the front lens was in backwards and he bet that they were all that way. So he reassembled the one he'd been working on and then lifted up another one and looked through the end at the front lens and it was wrong too. Aric said that now that he knew what the problem was it wouldn't take more than a couple of hours to fix the rest of them and that he might as well give me a tour of the rest of the theatre while we were here. He said that the smartest thing about the light shop was that it was above the scene shop and it connected both theatres. There was a door on either wall near where we'd come in that led into the catwalks. He said that we might as well go into Balch first, and he led me onto the catwalk that ran above backstage and then over what he called the house—where the people sat. There were lots of other lights hung from the railings and he named them all as we went by—there were Kliegels and Parcans and Fresnels and Shakespeares and after a while I couldn't keep track of them any more. One end of the catwalk was right over the top of the stage and there was a bare light bulb hanging from it which was so bright it hurt my eyes and Aric said that was the ghost light and they had found it when they were cleaning out the lamp cabinet and that it was a two thousand watt lamp. Then we went all the way into the back where there was a door which went down to the lighting booth where I'd been before. I'd already seen that, so I said that I wanted to see the other theatre, which was called Dalton. When we got over there the catwalks were much nicer because they were more open and didn't have beams across them. He said that from a lighting perspective, it wasn't as good because the catwalks were in the wrong place so they had to improvise a lot. It was all right for a concert, he told me, but there was a dance troupe that performed in there and it was really tricky to get the lights where he wanted them for their show. He told me that at the last show, he'd used every one of the patch cables I'd seen hanging in the light shop. Then he showed me to the light booth, which was a bit wider than the other one, and he said that was nice but the lighting board was a lot older. He said it was more fun to use, though because it wasn't as automated so you had to do a lot of effects by hand. When we were going back to the light shop, he pointed to a border in the stage and he said that the whole front of the stage could be lowered all the way into the basement and at first I didn't think that was possible but then remembered how the whole restaurant at the Space Needle had rotated so I guess if that could be built then a giant stage elevator was possible. I wanted to see it work, but he said that it took a key he didn't have. He told me that he could show me one other secret, though, and when we were in the light shop he pointed up to a hatch in the ceiling which he said went to the attic and he said that from there you could get onto the roof. I stuck out my tongue and told him that I could get on the roof whenever I wanted to. He said that this was more fun than just flying up there and climbed the ladder to the hatch and undid the lock and then opened it up. I flew up behind him but he had to grab my forelegs and pull me through because the opening wasn't wide enough for me to fit. There were a few bare light bulbs hanging around that gave enough light to see, and there was a catwalk that led off to the north, I thought—it went off in the direction of the Balch theatre. He led me along it until we got to another short ladder and there was a hatch above that and he said that we couldn’t go through because it was daytime and students weren't supposed to know it was there but he pushed it up just a little and I could see daylight through it. He said that some night we ought to come out here and look at Kalamazoo because it was the second-best place he'd found to get a look at the city at night: the first-best was the top of the parking garage next to the hotel. He supposed that the hotel was probably a good place, too, but he had never gotten a room there. Once we were back in the light shop, he said that I could stay and watch him work if I wanted to but if I had other stuff I wanted to do that was okay, too. I knew that I probably would get bored watching him work all afternoon and I really wanted to fly because even though the day had started out chilly it was just getting nicer and nicer. When I got back to our dorm room to get my flight gear Peggy was there like she'd said she would be, but instead of doing her homework she was watching a movie on her computer. She said that I looked happy and hadn't called or showed up late at night so things must have gone well, and I said that they had and she reminded me that I still had to tell Meghan and I said that I knew but I didn't have to do it right away and I was going to go flying before dinner. I didn't challenge myself; I just took a nice, lazy flight over the city. There were a few decent thermals that gave me a boost, which was nice. I could circle in them and get some altitude with almost no effort on my part, and then mostly glide along until I came to the next one. I did sort of lose track of time, though, and didn't get back until kinda late. I hadn't missed dinner, but all of my friends were already gone, and I had to eat by myself and most of the food had already been taken. But there was still a good selection of salad, and some cookies left, too. Even though I didn't like taking showers at night, I decided that I ought to at least rinse myself off, since I'd been running and flying and there was probably a lot of sweat dried in my coat. And then I meant to just stretch out on bed until I'd dried off but I hadn't really gotten enough sleep last night because I dozed off and didn't wake up until a couple of hours later. Peggy and Sean and Christine were playing euchre and when they saw I was awake they decided to partner me with Peggy and we played a couple of games before it was bedtime for everyone.