I used to love building theater sets. I wasn't very good at it, but it was satisfying to help a vision come to life over the course of a few weeks. I actually almost didn't graduate high school because of my insistence on working both behind-the-scenes and on the stage. We were striking Our Town my senior year, after four successful performances as Doc Gibbs. I had to attend the strike as both a cast member and an Intro to Stage Tech student. When my goat-looking friend Brian climbed into the fly racks to raise a $10,000 white curtain up, I was tasked with watching to make sure he only raised it about halfway since it was still partially tied to the pipes. As he pulled the curtain up, I watched carefully to make sure it didn't rip. Just a few more feet... "STOP!" I shouted. But Brian didn't stop. A loud tearing sound echoed through the empty stage. Brian made angry eye contact with me, then lowered the curtain down a few feet to hide the tear.

We didn't speak to each other the rest of the strike, but when I got back from Thanksgiving break our technical theater director was out for blood. She didn't blame Brian, since he knew his place as a "techie" and didn't audition for shows like I did. She tried to pin the whole thing on me, including a $10,000 obligation that would block me from graduating. Luckily, I knew the administration at the school pretty well from working on the school paper and we figured it out long before it became a problem. During that time, I was a lot like Mr. Matheson in today's comic. Hard working, head down, full of anger over a situation I couldn't talk about.

If you want to see my first try at designing sets with AI, check out this video. This model was part of the base that became my suite of Stable Diffusion models.

Check in tomorrow for one final adventure with Cornerstone Theater's high muckety-muck Michael Special!

Latch on to learning!

Bill Meeks
Creator, Everly Heights