Here's What I Was Building About This Time Two Years Ago

Does Anyone But Me Remember?


In November, December, and January of 2004/2005 I spent most of my days running around in circles a few hundred yards from the Atlantic Ocean in St. Simons Island's "Old Casino" Theater, building the set for the Agatha Christi play "The Mousetrap."

The director challenged me to duplicate the original set used in London's West End Theater back in the 1950's, and I ended up doing the entire project virtually alone because of "Theater Politics"--they did manage to establish a chorus of malcontents that endlessly complained about the cost of my efforts after I spent the budget pre-approved and allocated for the project.

In the end, when the dust settled, after expending over 300 hours of my time, the fruits of my efforts looked like this:

Excuse the shadows in the working lighting, but I never managed to get pictures of my set with the show lighting because I didn't ever attend a performance of the play.

Here's a look at the 10' tall window center stage--that baby took nearly a week to cut out and to hand stain all of the individual wood pieces (I also painted the snow draped tree landscape in the background.)




I was actually pretty pissed off about the results of so-called set decorator's efforts with the furniture selections since they had promised me that they would match the scale of the room (14' high walls) with new chairs and tables that everyone on the southeastern Georgia coast hadn't already seen 27 times on the sets of plays beforehand.

I was rewarded for my efforts with the omission of any credit for being Set Designer and Set Construction Chief in the Published Performance Program, and when I finally returned to the theater at the end of the show's public presentation several of the usual suspects the other jealous theater assholes of my other helpful assistants had reduced the big window (which I had built to be included in the sets of next two shows) to toothpick size pieces of broken wood.

I was furious, and like my current entrepreneurial situation, I quit as a result of my obvious but yet confusing shortcomings...

Is it just me, or what?