This is an excerpt from some of my writing. It explains a typical day of what I was doing at that point in my career.

May 1995

... ever since I graduated high school, I have been making my living working as a free-lance audio engineer. For the last five years most of my work has been for a company named Troika. Troika is a company located in Rockville Maryland which produces national tours of Broadway musicals. Needless to say, to earn a living doing theatre is like a dream come true. Not only has it been a fulfilling way to earn a living, but it has also provided me the opportunity to have traveled to all of the contiguous states, and to just about everywhere in Canada. There are very few cities with theaters, that I haven't been to. Now that may sound somewhat glamorous, but let me explain exactly what I do.

As the audio engineer on a tour, I am solely responsible for the setup, operation, maintenance and strike of the sound package that we carry with us. Depending on the show, we travel with three or four tractor trailers which carry the sets, costumes, lights, props, sound and anything else we need to do the show, in essence we are completely self contained. The crew usually travels in a rock & roll bus and the cast travels in a standard sit up bus. However we do need a theatre and a local crew of stagehands to help us load in, run and strike the show. A standard day is what roadies call a "one nighter" and what follows is the typical schedule of such a day.

7:30am wake up call (1/2 hour), to start load in at 8am. Load in for four or five hours (depending on local union rules) and then take an hour for lunch. After lunch it can take anywhere from one to three more hours to finish load in. The time it takes depends mostly on the local crew and the theatre, not to mention your own personal state of being. If I get done before five thirty, this is time for myself to either take a shower, do laundry, go shopping, eat dinner or take a nap. Sometimes it sucks having to choose which one you want to do most. I then have to be back to the theatre at five thirty for a sound check which usually lasts about sixty minutes, if there are no major problems. This is sometimes the most stressful part of the job because it takes a lot of work to keep a show sounding consistant when the accoustics change every night. Then at seven, I spend approximately a half hour training the local sound man about the wireless mics and teaching him his cues during the show. Then at eight it's show time! My job during the show is to mix the show and make it sound as good as possible. Which isn't always an easy task. Have you ever tried to please twenty five hundred theatre go'ers? Everyone of which has an opinion about how it should sound, it's funny that two people can sit next to each other, and one will tell you "it's not loud enough" and the other will say "it's too loud", go figure. Anyway in my field we have a joke that everyone knows two things, their job and sound. Mixing the show is probably the hardest part of the job, because it gets very difficult to make the show sound consistent when the acoustics are different from day to day. Also it's hard to have much enthusiasm for a show after you've done it almost everyday for months and months. Can you imagine sitting through The Sound of Music almost two hundred times? Well let me tell you, I did it and it wasn't much fun, and don't even ask if it's one of my favorite things! Anyway immediately after the show ends we start the strike, which can last anywhere from two to three hours. When we finish packing the last truck, it's time to get on the bus. While we are sleeping in our bunks, the bus driver will drive through the night to the next city and at seven thirty the cycle starts all over again. Now that may sound extremely tiring, and it is, but luckily not every stop is a "one nighter" Whenever we play a city for more than one night after the first nights show instead of strike we go to a hotel and sleep in a non moving bed. Usually however we don't go to sleep until we spend a couple of hours at the bar relaxing and tying one on. Then the next day we have free until show call which is either noon thiry for a 2pm matinee or six thirty for an 8pm show. So if your lucky enough to not have a matinee, you can have a whole day free to explore the city, sleep, shop or do laundry, whichever you choose. Now you're probably wondering what kind of social life one can have while living on a bus or in hotels for the better half of a year. The answer to that is... to be continued...

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