I lost my heart at HellsGate

There is a road in Rockford, Illinois that is known locally as ‘Murder Road.’

If you follow that road far enough, you end up at one of the most beautiful haunted houses I have ever seen.

Welcome to HellsGate.

I can’t do a better job of describing the amazing amount of detail put into this haunted attraction any better than John Laflamboy and the Zombie Army did in last year’s episode of Days of the Living Dead, here: Raising Hell. In an industry where so many of us struggle to find a usable location to turn into a haunt, that video is a breathtaking example of what building exactly to your specifications looks like. 

And holy poop, was it worth the effort. As someone whose haunt roots are deeply entrenched in theatrical shows, I found the level of detail to be astonishing…from the solid bannister in the first room to the wallpaper and lathe to the ceiling textures and wood beams, there’s so much to take in that I think the VIP pass should be one that just lets you walk around taking your time to see everything. We didn’t see a single thing that looked unfinished. I don’t want to give anything away, so I think I’m just going to say that the opening room, the twins’ room (OMGdollhouses) and the trophy room were my favourite scenes…although the slides were a first for me and I kinda love the way one leaves the haunt! 

The actors’ costuming and characters were exactly what you would expect from the Zombie Army: detailed, unique, and smart. No random screamers, no ‘get out’..good startles, true to character, often creepy as hell. And you WILL see acrobatics that will wow you. Indeed, the ‘wow’ factor is left in the very capabkw hands of the actors. There are some animations, but the majority of the scares are delivered by the cast. While  I think I might have liked to see some stronger characters working the front of the house, there were some really great queue line actors. (Bird lady, I’m looking at you.) 

Speaking of the queue line? So well done. Excellently managed so you don’t really see how long the wait is ahead of you. From being bussed into the ticket line to walking up the the haunt and cemetery to the way they filter you into the haunt, I was very impressed with how well HellsGate handles its crowd.  Judging by Facebook, the queue line and wait time needed to be tweaked after opening weekend, and from what I see, this was done successfully. (Also? I’ve NEVER seen a haunt say to its attendees, “If you had a problem opening weekend, we’d like you to come back.” This is me paraphrasing, of course, but dang, that’s some awesome customer service right there.)

It’s my personal belief that a quality haunt should have a walk-through cemetery. HellsGate does not disappoint. They make great use of the environment and add enough creepy dangling decor to completely distract me – which, I’m sure, frustrated the actors trying their best to scare me. The cemetery is a great example of a place where you will miss things if you don’t take the time to stop and look up, or look behind you. The visuals are so, so worth it.

If you are a fan of Crimson Peak-esque horror, if you love high detail, if you long to visit a place that feels real, you need to get yourself out to HellsGate.

…I can’t wait to go back.

Sean “Bazil” Duran: November 25, 1966 – April 30, 2016

I have so much I want to write and I have no idea how to write it.

So let’s start with a present.

“I have a present for you,” Chris said, somewhere around 1993, and handed me this little plaster Day of the Dead sculpture.  “Bazil made it.  He made a bunch for a gallery in Chestnut Hill, but when they told him they were gonna sell them as authentic Mexican art, he said no and took them back, so…this one’s for you.”

When I think about Bazil – Sean – this story always comes to mind.  I didn’t know him well, but I knew he had strong convictions and would not only stick to them, but would also make sure the people around him did as well.

Sean was one of the iconic actors at my beloved haunt, Grisly Gothic Gables.  He joined the cast to help him learn how to talk in front of crowds (or so I’ve been told), and perhaps one of the reasons I can’t think of Grisly without thinking of him is that he proposed the haunt’s name to the owner, Allan, during a brain storming session.  His butler character was funny-bizarre, vaguely slobby, definitely frenetic…my favourite haunt memory of him is him filling in for a clown scare, still dressed as a butler.  When the time came to scare visitors, he rose out of a hollowed out bed holding a fake butcher knife and announcing, “I’m not a clown, but I’ll kill you anyway!”

(Lesson:  As long as you understand the scare and what’s expected of you, improv – even if it’s on the bizarre side – as long as it’s in the character of the haunt?  It works.)

I suppose it helps to understand that I became a haunter not because I loved scary movies (which I did) or because I thought Halloween was pretty (which I did), but because the first time I saw Grisly Gothic Gables, with Bazil and Janice at the front of the house looking like everything I’ve ever wanted to see in haunt actors…well, I fell in love with the haunt, with the cast, and at the core of my haunter-heart you’ll still find that perfect visual.

You’ll still find Bazil.

Bazil was the one that helped my ex husband understand why haunting is fun.  “Do you know what a pig pile is?” Bazil asked one day.  “You don’t?  Ok.  So let’s say you enter a room through a door on the left side of the room and the exit door is clearly visible on the right side.  How do you leave the room?  No, you don’t go out the exit door, you jump on top of each other LIKE THIS!! and then you knock down a wall behind you and you leave that way.”  Despite being jumped on and nearly knocked over, my ex agreed to come to Grisly to see what a night of haunting was like, and he ended up doing tag-team scares with Bazil.

…Good times.

At the museum where we all worked, Bazil did so much that most people don’t know, rather like at Grisly, where he designed several of our t-shirt designs with no credit claimed.  He (along with fellow Grisly Peter Cook and Peter’s wife, Lisa) worked on a book about our dioramas that has been used extensively by the teacher naturalists there, and can be found now in the Drexel University library.  He discovered a forgotten mummy by literally tripping over it in our collections. He restored Edgar Allan Poe’s raven, which now resides at the Philadelphia Free Library.  He worked on the butterfly exhibit where I became a butterfly keeper, and helped create The Big Dig, an interactive looking-for-fossils exhibit I helped maintain over the years.  (I’m told he was inspired by Peter and Lisa’s visit to the Indianapolis Children’s Museum.)  He and artist Ray Troll worked together on several projects, including one at our museum. He was instrumental in creating the Crazy Critters Chuck Jones exhibit that I have…way way too many stories about working.

For someone who touched so much of my professional life at the Academy, you really would think we would have seen each other more. Alas.

Bazil moved on to work at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science in Miami, where his resume is truly amazing. Like, amazing in a way that you look at and you think, ‘What couldn’t this guy do??’ I think I speak for many of us when I say that Bazil was the kind of person you quietly make a role model and you hope someday to be even a fraction as good at..well..ANYTHING as he was.  Because he touched so many people’s lives and varied worlds, I’m sure there’s an incredible amount of stories and discoveries to come that will astound those of us that knew him.  (Heck, just from the bit of research I’ve done here, I’m in awe of the man.)

Bazil is survived by his wife, Kat, and his daughter, Bridget…and he’s mourned by too many people to count.

Thank you for touching my life and for inspiring me, you most perfect Grisly.

Info about a celebration of his life:

More info about Sean:

http://www.frostscience.org/blog/a-loss-for-frost-science-and-miami

https://sciencemuses.wordpress.com/2016/05/01/your-listening-hue/

http://blog.orselli.net/2011/09/why-we-do-what-we-do-interview-with.html

http://www.martinhsu.com/press.php?p=50 – Dinosaurs of China exhibit

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article6718815.html – Amazon exhibit

http://www.frostscience.org/blog/miasci%E2%80%99s-sean-duran-awarded-prestigious-noyce-leadership-institute-fellowship

http://www.frostscience.org/blog/green-roof-tour

 

 

flying into the future

I am a very nervous traveler.  In case I haven’t made that clear enough.

By the time my date of departure has arrived, I’ve left Bones copious notes on how to run the office without me.  He has copies of my travel itinerary, travel insurance, and visa. And he’s had to deal with my almost-frantic need to be at the airport 2 hours early.

“It’s a tiny airport,” he reassures me.  “An hour will be fine.”

As it turns out, my itinerary has the wrong departure time on it, and we end up arriving at Kalamazoo Int’l Airport about 10 minutes before my flight is supposed to leave.

*cue panic*

Of course, everything is fine – it’s always fine – and Bones walks me up to  Security.  I realize that the last person to do this was my mother, in North Carolina, many years ago.  I pretty much always fly alone, which is partly why I’m so nervous about travel.  (Ironically, someone that was a love interest for half a second told me I was a ‘cupcake’ and he couldn’t imagine me navigating an airport alone.  That statement still has too much volume in my head.)  Don’t get me wrong..I love travel. I love flying. I love the adventure of it all and I think I even love the overly inflated sense of responsibility I have to make sure everything I can control goes right.  But anyway….yes, Bones walks with me and I am overwhelmed by how patient and supportive he is.

I start to cry.

“You’re going to AUSTRALIA!” he says, and hugs me, and he looks so damn happy for me that it makes me cry a little more.  He’s so selfless.  Never at any point has he acted jealous or negative in any way about this trip, this opportunity.

I am so very, very lucky.

~~~

The Kalamazoo airport is just minutes from my house, and it may be one of the nicest airports I’ve ever had the pleasure to visit.  I board a small plane that hops me over to Detroit, where I decide to go get a drink and some lunch.  Idly, I check in with JS and discover he’s also in Detroit, a few gates over from me!  (We’d been joking about racing to see who got to Australia first..after we actually compare our tickets, we realize we’re on the same flight from LA to Australia.  So much for racing!)

JS and I visit for a bit. His flight is scheduled to leave a bit after mine, and he strikes me as someone who is remarkably ok with waiting for the next stage of his trip.  (I get a little restless, I admit, and while I like to be at my gate early, I will also tend to go look at the local shops to kill some time.)  Then it’s off on our next flights, to meet again in LA!

This is my second time at LAX, and I can’t say I’ve cared for my experiences there yet.  Today is no exception.  A glance at the departure board tells me I need to go to gate 52B.  Which takes some searching.  Because it looks like this:

As it turns out, we have to take a shuttle bus from this gate to the int’l terminal.  Have you ever wanted to be in a vehicle driving alongside planes? I did not want that experience. But I got it. We are taken to a TOTALLY EMPTY terminal and I won’t lie, it’s a little creepy..

I send JS a series of Facebook emails (that he doesn’t see until he gets to Australia) telling him what to expect, as the passengers that share the shuttle with me admit they’d all been sitting up by this sign for far too long, not knowing they had to go somewhere else, and I know JS has a shorter layover than I do.  I then walk along with my six fellow travelers to what I’m pretty sure is our certain doooooooooom (Clive Barker’s Midnight Meat Train, anyone?), but  – lo and behold! – instead we find ourselves in the happily busy international terminal.  YAY!  I get my American money converted into Australian dollars, find some much needed coffee, eventually find JS, and get in line to get onto the next plane.  Which, as it turns out, is on Virgin Australia.

Ok, Virgin. I think I love you. Everyone gets water, eye masks, ear plugs, book marks, and a pen. Snacks and sodas by the rest rooms so you can serve your own dang self all thorugh the 13 hour flight.  Also? USB plug so I can charge my phone  AND an entire row to myself so I can stretch out and SLEEP!

Next stop?  AUSTRALIA!!!

 

i’ve got the power?

Back at home, I realize that most of the packing I’ve already done should probably be redone.  One suitcase is dedicated to costuming, and contains wigs, makeup, 3 pairs of shoes that have all been test-worn to make sure they’re comfy, 3 costumes (2 dresses and one coat-and-pants outfit in case it rains), a glue gun, needle and thread, zip ties, varied types of plug adapters, some small hand tools…anything I can think of that might be useful for build/tear down as well as costume repair and daily haunt work.

I keep reminding myself that this is not China, that I’ll be able to buy things if I need them.

I keep ignoring that rational part of my brain and rethinking everything I’ve already packed.

The other suitcase contains day to day needs.  Clothing for down time, work clothing, sunblock, hats, pain killers, bandages, protein bars, antacids, Zip Fizz…I keep rechecking the weight of the suitcase, reconsidering the contents, adding stuff, taking stuff out..

Bones tolerates the chaos very well.  Because the man is a saint.

Several trips to the thrift store later, I’m pretty sure I’m as prepared as I’m gonna get.  Maybe.  Probably.

My carry-on contains,among other small items, yet another pair of shoes and a power converter with an adapter plug.  This is something that completely confused me on my China trip, and so I’m overcompensating this time around.  I think most of us know that the electricity in the US is 110V and 220V pretty much everywhere else.  Which means you need to buy a power converter.  However, the outlets are also different, so you also need a plug converter.  When I went to China, I only bought the plug converter…and honestly, when you do a search on ‘power converter’ on Amazon, you get more plug converters than power converters, so I’m sure I’m not the only one that’s not purchased both parts of the needed system.

Additionally in China, we had power surges and people using the converters that didn’t really know how to use them…so we had lots of fried equipment.  The trick with converters is to get one that will handle the wattage you plan to use…so you have to take a look at the electronics you’re bringing and figure out how strong a converter you need to purchase.  If you underestimate your wattage need, that’s when your electronics get destroyed.  After a lot of thought and looking at my budget, I decided I really didn’t need to bring a hair dryer or flat iron, so a 100 watt converter would probably be fine, and I already had a plug adapter.

I actually can’t find a pic of my adapter, but it looks sorta like this.  I purchased this power converter, which is a heavy lil’ guy, so I packed it in my carry-on bag, and while it could handle my glue gun, it probably couldn’t have handled a hairdryer.  I liked the USB port on it, because it meant we could charge multiple things at one time.  That said, if all you’re worried about is keeping your celphone charged, you could totally buy something like this and make your life much easier.

In the days leading up to my departure date, I obsess about supermarkets and food prices and how the guys don’t seem nearly as concerned as I am but I’m on a super tight budget and I am WORRIED and B1 told us to do it THIS WAY and maybe no one but me intends to do that and maybe I can get a slick little ‘buy from us and we’ll give you deals’ card from the stores but oh I can’t get that mailed to me in time and maybe I shouldn’t bring so MANY shoes but I’m so scared my plantar fasciitis might flare and that’s a hell I just don’t want to ever face again ever and is that really strong enough sunblock and…

Proof of Bones’ sainthood is that he didn’t strangle me during those final days of preparation.

 

frozen bottles of waters might just save your life

One of the things that I was immediately impressed with about the prep for my Australia trip was the lack of things I had to worry about.

“What airport do you want to fly out of?”

“Ummm…Kalamazoo, if it’s possible…”

“You got it!  Your visas will be emailed to you soon.”

“Wait, I don’t have to apply for those?”

“Nope!  It’s covered.”

“What about travel insurance?”

“Covered!  Details are coming.”

“How many suitcases can I bring…?”

“Two.”

“What’s the luggage fee?”

“….It’s covered!”

“BUT I STILL HAVE CONCERNS AND QUESTIONS AND AUUUUUGH!!!” *

“We’re having a one day meeting/training here before you leave the country!”

The way this process usually works is that people interested in joining Haunt Team USA head to Ohio for a two-day “boot camp” in which candidates get into costume and practice the types of things they will have to do in Australia.  It’s a tough, intense audition.  People that end up going don’t always get selected their first time through the boot camp.  But it is, hands down, the absolute best way B&B can prepare their team, and we’re at a disadvantage because we aren’t getting the benefit of that training.  Instead, we’re having a very abbreviated ‘here’s what you need to know’ intensive workshop.

That meeting was when I first met the people I’d be living with for about a month…JS, the oldest member of our team as well as the most extreme of us (think Rob Zombie covered in gore with a heart of gold and you’ve sorta kinda got JS in your mind), W, the youngest member of the team with the most experience for this gig (this would be his 7th show in Australia!), and R, W’s girlfriend (an Aussie and a sorta-team-member).  We spent maybe 5 hours going over the gritty details of what we needed to know to be really prepared for this upcoming adventure.  B&B do an outstanding job of prepping the members of Haunt Team USA, and their notes include a suggested shopping list, as buying groceries is something you might only get one chance to do so.

B1 focuses a lot on buying groceries.  “Grab two carts.  Fill them.  Spend $100 for each person.  Have your list ready ahead of time.  Buy anything you think you might want, and then take turns cooking meals for the group.”  He makes it very clear that the best way to get through this venture is to work as a team.

He warns us that good insoles will be your best friend.  Also, frozen bottles of water might  just save your life.  Oh, and bring things you don’t mind not bringing back with you.

“Haunted houses are still new in Australia.  The audience there is not like what you find here.  They will scare differently.”

We’re given instructions on how to manage ticket collecting at the door…told to try to defuse situations at the haunt rather than be aggressive about them…told to watch out for Vietnamese gangs that might try to steal tickets from us.

And also?  Fear the daystar.

“There’s no ozone layer over Australia,” B&B warn us.

“Ummm…say what now?”

“No, really,” R chimes in.  “It’s a serious thing.”

B&B, as well as W, share stories of sunburn – “My eyelids got burned!” is one in particular that terrifies me – that make me want to run from the room screaming in terror.  I can get more surnburn in 30 minutes than most people will get over an entire summer. Finally!  Something I can for real legit worry about:  How will I ever survive nearly a month without being burned to a crisp??

In the midst of my worry, it’s suggested I go get the metric poop ton of costuming I’ve brought along with me to go over character ideas with B2 while B1 continues to talk to the rest of the team.  Part of the interview process for this gig was sending photos of myself in varied haunt costumes, and I thought I was more or less prepared costume-wise, but in my panic over sunburn and heat stroke, I’m already eliminating about half of what I’ve brought with me.  (Admittedly, part of my problem is that my focus has always been more on operations than on performing; so, although I have characters, haunt acting is secondary to me.)  B2 patiently dealt with my panicked self as I babbled my concerns at her, threw costuming all over her living room, and whittled my choices down to three.  B2 then had a photographer-friend shoot some pics of me to be considered for use for a booth display B&B were taking to TransWorld in a few weeks…

Next was dinner, and then an extended bit of chatter after everyone but me had left (extended, in part, because I friggin’ love B&B and hadn’t seen them in much too long)…which means I got home ungodly late.  But it was worth it.  Because now not only did I feel more prepared, but – as previously mentioned – I now had something to actually obsess about…sun protection!

Back at home to repack my suitcases a few dozen more times over the next week, and then….to the airport we go!

 

* I wasn’t entirely this bad.  I think.  Probably.

…No, I was totally insanely bad.

globe-trotter haunter

I think it was in 2012 when I first heard that my friends B&B were recruiting haunters to come and audition to work for a show in Australia. There were multiple opportunities lasting from 3 weeks to 2 months and I was so very curious…I remember taking to Bones about it, trying to figure out the logistics, and ultimately I just wasn’t sure it was practical. Or that I was fit enough. Or young enough. Or a strong enough actor.

The following year, I thought about it again, but not as seriously. Then the China gig came up, and I jumped into that experience with absolutely NO idea what I was really getting into.

I came back and told Bones, “Ok. The need to go to Australia is out of my system.”

…Which made the universe sit up, take notice, and ask, “Oh, really?”

B&B knew I’d been to China – we had discussed it very briefly, and they know J, the guy that hired me on. And of course they knew I had an interest in Australia.

– I mean, what no one has known until this moment is how many sweepstakes I’ve entered where a trip to Australia was the grand prize. When The Bloggess wrote about going there as a result of a “bucket list” contest, I looked into that. I have had a long obsession with the wildlife. I’ve been trying to get Bones to agree that what we really need to make our lives complete is a wallaby butler and a platypus to keep him company.

So you could say I’ve put a LOT of energy over a LOT of years manifesting this opportunity.

…Anyway! Earlier this year, I received an email from B&B asking if I knew anyone that might be interested in going to Australia in March. I sent a few emails to people I thought would be AMAZING candidates…and then, after talking to Bones, I took a deep breath and filed out the application myself.

After several emails about gig details, asking for a bio, and photo requests, I learned (a) I was their runner up choice for their team of three, and (b) one of their three wasn’t able to make it. What followed was a long honest discussion with B&B about the logistics of this trip..how hard it was going to be..how serious I was about going.

Here’s the deal: Most haunts operate for a few set hours a night. Yes, there’s hours of prep involved, but actual operations are not that long, and usually they’re focused on weekends. This gig? It’s a whole different animal. It’s set up/training actors/running the show for 14 days straight, 10-12 hours a day, starting at 9am/tear down/go home. It’s set up in something that’s sorta a county fair on steroids, which…I’ve worked a haunt at a county fair before. It’s probably a lot like working a haunt on the Jersey boardwalk. So you’re talking hot and sun and rain and nonstop work.

So, not a cake walk.

But.  But but but…AUSTRALIA!

Did I have any health concerns?  Well, yes. My feet.  My feet are a recurring issue for me.

Was Bones ok with me going?  Yes.

Do I have a valid passport?  Yes.

Have I ever worked with a microphone before?  Yes.  Granted, not in a haunted house, but if you can talk on headset answering visitors’ questions while working in a minizoo with a screaming parrot and a gaggle of teenage volunteers, you can probably handle being on headset at a haunt, yes?

Have I been in costume for 12 hours?  Ummm…sorta?  Does a ren faire count?

At the end of the call, I was advised to go talk to Bones some more and spend some more time thinking about everything that had been discussed in the past 30 minutes, and to let B&B know in 24 hours if I was still in or not.

…I didn’t need that much time to email them back and say, ‘Yes please!’

*cue the panic to get everything done and documented at work so that Bones will be in the best possible position for me to be gone for 3+ weeks*

AUSTRALIA!!!

 

on the issue of selfies, snapchat, and consent

Over the next stretch of weeks, I’ll be writing about my recent trip to work a haunted attraction in Australia – yes, really! Australia! – and it’s a mixed bag of experiences, to be sure…but one of the biggest things sticking in my memory is not exactly related to haunting.

Selfies.

What I found, while being in costume at the haunt, was that everyone wants a photo of characters.  That’s not unusual, but it was…extreme in Sydney.  One of our team members literally couldn’t take a step at times without being asked to pose for a photograph. (I videotaped this because it was truly amazing how many requests he would get.)

Perhaps not unexpectedly, the daytime crowds were nicer about this than the people that showed up as the sun went down.  We moved from having family groups with babies to teenagers and early 20-something year olds that were more aggressive about their requests.  I realized, as the requests came in, that they weren’t requests.

They were demands.

As a woman, this was far from a comfortable situation.  It didn’t matter if I was working, if I was obviously busy, even if I was talking to someone else.  The only answer to, “Can I take a selfie with you?” is, “Yes.”

If you say no, you find a celphone-holding hand being slipped around you and a photo being snapped.  In my case, I was taking tickets in a line queue, so there was no way I could avoid having people surround me, and honestly after 12 hours of work, I didn’t have the patience I had earlier in the day to just grin and bear it.

Also?  That’s a disturbing thought right there. I can’t say no. I can’t stop this from happening. My best bet is to smile and pretend it’s ok.

That’s exactly what I found myself thinking, and in light of the growing awareness of rape culture, that’s friggin’ disturbing.

There’s no WAY this is ok. 

“But it’s just a photograph, right?  Why is that a bad thing?”

Because ANY time your right to say no to something that involves your body, your personal space, is taken away?  There’s no damn WAY that’s anything BUT a bad thing.

I’m in no way familiar with the world of selfies and Snapchat, so maybe the aggressive taking of these pics is only news to me.  But seriously?  I ever catch someone I know treating anyone the way I was treated in Australia, I will make sure that behavior stops ASAP.

And if you’re one of those people thinking you have a right to take a photo of someone just because you want to do it even though you’ve been told no?

You’re wrong.

You’re being abusive.

You need to check your privilege and re-educate yourself about what ‘no’ means.

 

banishing the bad

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t explain that correctly.”

Although the comment isn’t directed at me, I can’t help but hear the comment, note how instead of blaming the person doing the task incorrectly, our person in charge is taking responsibility as she corrects the problem.

I continue to paint the wall in front of me, but my thoughts are of another work site, where I was in the process of repainting a skull and replacing it on a facade.

“Wow.  That’s horrible,” my  boss says from below my ladder.

It wasn’t what I was used to.  At all.  If it had been said to someone else, I might have protested his words.  But it was said to me, and I wanted to do a good job, so I tried to laugh it off and figure out what about the task was wrong.

This was one of my first days working for him.  It set the tone for the next seven years – criticism, sometimes couched in ‘oh you know I’m kidding’, and praise/compliments mostly offered when there was no other audience but me.

I love having the opportunity to help create scenes, environments.  Usually that’s within the walls of a haunted house.  I’d fallen in love with this haunt and I was eager for the opportunity to work here as often as possible.  Indeed, it was this haunt that had set me on the path to becoming “Halloween Girl” more so than any other haunt project or commitment I’d taken on up to that point in my life.

Part of the appeal was that I was working for a friend.

I didn’t know at the time that I was actually working for a narcissist.

What that means, for me, is that I spent those years on a roller coaster of praise and abuse.  I could do anything; I was mostly useless. I was one of his best friends; the more I hurt, the more he wanted to hurt me.  The people that worked this haunt were a family; I wasn’t supposed to talk to them about much of anything. The stories and the rules changed depending on the audience, and while hindsight makes it all very clear, the day to day process of living with it is bewildering.

Here’s the really hard thing:  This all happened me to before the average person knew the definition of  ‘narcissistic personality disorder.’ On one hand, when I walked away from that job, I knew I would be cyberstalked, so it changed many of the ways I handle myself online (including why I am being admittedly vague, and even still I’m having a hard time hitting ‘publish’), and I grew to learn that people that were paying attention weren’t believing the smear campaign that still goes on to this day.  Which is typical for a narcissist.

More deeply rooted, and the bigger surprise, was the unexpected PTSD.  I found that had lost a lot of my confidence, my ability to trust my coworkers.  When Bones and I started our haunt and were building the show, I struggled a lot with an unexpected need for reassurance.  And when I started working at the theatre, I discovered that I was shocked to hear people treating each other with respect.  That it was ok to take a break.  That the way I used to treat my fellow crew members was actually the *norm* rather than something to be mocked.  That mistakes weren’t met with, “Wow, that’s horrible,” or other demeaning critical comments, or compliments at the moment followed by negativity muttered to other ears.

I am lucky in that I’ve worked with people that understand why I have PTSD.  They’ve known the players in my story. They’ve been able to  tell by the look on my face when I’ve stopped hearing them and started hearing the past.  Sometimes I feel like every job offers one more bit of healing. And sometimes it’s really hard to not just walk around hugging people that are being genuinely kind to each other on a work site.

 

 

a class in casting

“Have any of you done casting before?” Stacy asked our tiny group of three students.  I raised my hand, feeling a little foolish in doing so.  My answer was yes, but I couldn’t say I really understood the process.

Of course, my first experience was helping to cast a leg bone of a type specimen fossil found in Egypt…

…That’s a leg bone from Paralititan.  The thing is nearly as tall as I am, and honestly, all I remember about the experience is that we were all learning as we went along and that it needed a mother mold to help support the dang thing.

I’d also had my face stolen…er, a cast made of my face…by my friend Lynati, but I’m not sure the experience entirely counts.  Still, both factoids helped me to feel not entirely lost as we started to learn varied applications of casting.

The main focus of the class was to create a mold and then cast a breakable bottle, as one would use on stage during a bar brawl.  The class stretched over the course of several weeks to allow the varied parts of the cast to be made, so we were also working on other projects.

For our first trick…sorry, project, Stacy handed us each a bit of blue clay and asked us to sculpt a Small Something.

I instantly panicked.  Sculpting really isn’t something I do.  But then I thought about how a friend sculpted these tiny faces to set into the high corners of her home, rather like easily-missed gargoyles, and I decided to try making something like that.  We each created a small box without a lid around our creations, mixed together two ingredients to create our mold, and poured that into the box.  (I should say, we used products from Smooth-On – a great company with great customer service that can help you choose the product that best fits your needs.  Because there’s a lot of stuff to choose from.)

Once it solidified, we could take the box apart and remove the clay sculpture, leaving a cavity in the shape of the art piece (shown in the first pic below).  Then we mixed together two other ingredients and poured that into the cavity, creating a cast.  When that had become a solid (second pic), we could remove it from the mold and…yay!  A face!

 …Not the creepy face I had  intended, but that probably says more about me than I’d like it to.

If you look a little closer at my finished face, you’ll see he has a kind of buck tooth thing going on.  This means that there’s a small pocket, probably created by air.  If I want to cast another face and I don’t want him to look derpy, I can pop a small bit of clay into that upper lip bit to I should say that when you mix your ingredients together to cast your mold, you don’t always have a lot of time to futz around with the liquid, as it wants to start solidifying pretty quickly, generally speaking.  So you move faaaaairly quickly, and you try to not waste materials if you can.  In our case, if we had mixed a little too much stuff, Stacy had us pour it into other casts to create things like mirrors, stars, and coins.  The last two items were then used in the Civic’s production of “Mary Poppins.”

This photo shows better what our sculptures looked like pre-mold, and what the casts looked like as they solidified.

Doing all this small stuff successfully filled in the time while we waited for the bigger stuff to get done….which looked like this!

We each took an empty beer bottle, created a ‘cork’ with a bit of clay, and glued it to a small square base.  Then we centered it within a cardboard tube and repeated the steps above.

The cardboard tube was cut on one side to allow us to open it up after the mold was created. In the first group of photos above, you’ll see that there are velcro bands around the tube; this was to hold it together because of that cut.  We also hot glued around the outside of the tube where it met up with that square bit of backing so that the mold mix wouldn’t leak out too much.  (Bear in mind:  Mold making is MESSY.)

Once we had a solid mold around our bottles, we removed the bottle and then created a wax cast of the bottle by pouring hot wax into the mold, waiting a moment, and then pouring the wax back into the original heated container.  We did this four or five times, and then we poured more of the mold making material (the blue stuff) into the cavity so that we had a cast of the inside of the bottle.  This all took longer than just one class session.

The wax bottle could then be disposed of (although of course I kept mine because WOO I MADE SOMETHING!!!).

The next step was to reassemble our mold so that the thing in the middle was inside the thing to the left, as perfectly centered as we could get it.  As it turned out, this was the hardest part of the whole project.

The above picture shows Stacy pouring very hot liquid plastic into one of our molds.  We tried the process twice.  None of us ended up with a perfect bottle. 😦

Lessons learned:

• If you waited for the cast to be completely cool?  It breaks when you try to remove it from the mold.
• The hot plastic will sorta settle into the mold as it cools, but if you top it off?  You will get the funky fake ‘cork’ seen in picture #2.
• Related:  You can add a second pour.  It won’t show as layers in the finished product.
• If you don’t have your inner mold perfectly centered?  You end up with the sort of swirly incomplete side seen in picture #3.
• If you are insane enough to want to fix your bottle with superglue?  Sure, you can do that…but this material is meant to be easily broken, so guess what?  It will break again very easily!  This is why the clearer bottle is such a mess.

It may be that the wax bottle process needed to be a little thicker.  We were so sure we had our inner molds centered, but I think all three of us had the same thing happen seen in picture #3.

Other things we did in class…we made vases!  (These were also used for “Mary Poppins.”)

I suck at vases.  These used a very solid ‘mother mold,’ which is a sort of cradle that supports the mold to keep your cast from getting wonky and your mold from warping.  I wasn’t quite strong enough to pop my vase half out of the mother mold easily.  It’s a very finicky process and I should have taken more photos of said process.  Alas.  The real reason for this photo was that I wanted to show the different finishes.  If the vase mold was sprayed with…I believe it was an auto body primer…you got this more paintable surface on your cast.

The other thing we worked on in this class was using a mold to fix a picture or mirror frame.  (I personally think this is the coolest thing ever.)

1.  Look at your frame and figure out what non-broken part of it matches the broken part.  You will be making a mold of that bit.
   

   

   

   Good bit – broken bit – make a mold!

2. When the putty-looking compound is dry, try to anticipate where your casting liquid is going to want to go and create dams with clay to keep it from escaping the mold.  I pretty much failed step two, but I can show you why.  See how there are all these open ends on the right side of the photo?  That’s where the liquid escaped.  It’s hard to see all of these areas when the mold is still on the frame.  Fortunately, you can add casting material in stages, so I ended up waiting for my first disastrously messy pour to harden up..then I’d add more…wait for THAT to harden up…and add a third batch.  Sigh!  But I promise, once everything’s done?  You can’t tell.
3. If desired, you can dye the casting material with something like this – it works kinda like food dye.  A little goes a long way.
4. If desired, you can also dust the inside of the mold with a powder that will help colour the cast as well.  (I apparently forgot to get photos of all of this.  Alas.  But you can see a bit of the gold powder in my mold.)
5. Pour your casting material into your mold.  NOTE:  This will create a cast that is attached directly onto your original frame!!!  For this to go perfectly, you want to make sure your mold is really flush with your frame; otherwise, you’ll have a slight lip at the connection point.  (Again, I apparently failed to take a pic of my finished piece, which was not perfect, but for a haunt would be pretty dang ok.)

So this is a huge dang blog post, but goodness, did I love the experience!  The materials are a little pricey, although starter kits are readily available online, and I’m really looking forward to being able to finding a practical application for these lessons!  😀

delayed dreams of painting

My first memory of working on a haunted house is less than glamorous.   I was standing in the basement of  a partially-in-use barn and was told, “We need to have this space cleaned so we can use it for a costume room.”  Next thing I knew?  All the people in that room had left me alone with a vacuum and a lot of work.

I did it, of course.  It didn’t occur to me to say, “Oh, hell no.”  But later, when I wrote about how I became a haunter, this story didn’t make the final cut.  Neither did the tale of my first legit project in the haunt, which was helping to build a set of front porch stairs.  This was much more exciting to me than I can adequately describe, because it was me  MAKING something.  As a child, I was largely denied the use of tools due to my gender, so…yeah.  I was pretty damned excited.

Before I ended up focusing primarily on actor hiring and management, I had the time to help in small ways with the creation of the haunt I loved so much.  In the beginning, that help was with scenic painting – in small ways, of course.  Our scenic painter, Mookie, guided my nervous self as we worked on curved crypt hallways and metallic lab wall panels.  She herself was full of fire, dramatic accents and laughter, covered in paint splatter, and embodied everything I thought a scenic should be.  She and our haunt boss seemed to share a brain, she seemed able to create any look he dreamed up, and she quickly became a sort of creative hero to baby-haunter-me.

Years later, after our haunt went dark, we became friends, and she brought me on for a day of helping paint some theatre sets. It was a fantastic experience.  But I never quite put it together in my head that I could maybe repeat that experience elsewhere.

As I’ve written here, I became my haunt’s scenic painter by default, with varying levels of success.  It’s been terrifying, to be honest, because I think about Mookie and all of the amazing things I’ve seen her create, and I know I don’t measure up to that.  I am well, well aware there’s so much I don’t know, and I want so much to be for Bones what Mookie was for Allan.

Last year, I saw an opportunity to help do some scenic painting at the Kalamazoo Civic for a show I was working on, “Crazy For You.”  Bones agreed to go along with me to help paint.  We spent the day working on huge drops under the guidance of the Civic’s David Kyhn, and by the end my arms were much more sore than I’d anticipated…but I’d learned so much!  (One of those things, of course, was that there were much easier ways to give a wall a woodgrained look than what I’d done at our haunt that year.  I hadn’t thought enough outside the box to realize I didn’t have to actually use a woodgraining tool on the panels…as gorgeous as it had looked, the detail was lost in haunt lighting.  Alas.  David’s techniques were much more practical.)

I’ve become a bit (?) of a scenic groupie since then, asking questions about how varied sets have been painted. I’m finding that I’m noticing more details in what Mookie painted back in Philly..that I’m starting to see things a little differently.  And when I noticed this page in the current Civic’s show’s program last night, I couldn’t wait to share it with Mookie.

I’ve probably never told Mookie how much I appreciate her guidance in the past – her patience and her passion – how much I think about her every time I wash out a paint brush – how much I value the adventures we’ve had together, and how much I think of her and miss her.

There’s a small list of people that inspire me to try to be a better haunter.  And oh, my beloved Mookie, you are ever on that list.  It’s a shame it’s taken me over 10 years to get to somewhere vaguely in your world – but I’m here, and I’m trying, and I’m thinking of you.  ❤