Aurora Magazine 2020

Aurora

As You Like It; or Love at First Sight Elizabeth Boyer

I have always been handy with tech. My dad and I ran all the tech equipment at church every Sunday. Church wasn’t my thing, but tech was my dad’s and my thing. It was pure happenstance I was in the class at all, but somehow I ended up as master electrician for Shakespeare’s As You Like It . “All I have left is Master Electrician,”my professor shrugged. The way she looked at me told me to drop out of the class while I still could. Instead, I wrote my name in that last slot. The whole class had an issue with focus day. They were afraid of heights. Did they not realize that theatre lights are usually pretty high up? You’re not going to use a damn footstool to get to them. So, I was the only one to go in the cherry picker. I was the only one to go on the FOH catwalks which were nothing more than a series of two-by- fours on their sides held together through a special feat of physics. I got sunburnt that day. Well, it wasn’t sunburn. It was 500 watts bearing down on me as I focused them only millimeters from their searing heat. It felt like life. It wasn’t long before all the channels were connected, Lecko’s were focused, and all the gobos were in. Then I was locked away in my 8-by-10 room for the beginning of several weeks of darkness pressing buttons and programming numbers into a computer. I forgot what sunlight was. There was hardly an hour that I wasn’t in that little box lit by only a small red light. Sometimes the stage had actors. Sometimes it was just Val and I. Still, it was home. An interesting fact in light of what I just wrote is that I wasn’t even a lighting person until that moment. I wasn’t a theatre person. I was minoring in theatre up until that very moment that Val gave me the signup sheet for class. A place where something happened after which I was never the same was the building right next to the theatre. It was the art building, the same place I walked past everday to get to my little dark home in the theatre. The only difference was today there was a sale for student pottery going on and my parents had come down for it and

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