Author: Jim

My time as a stage manager contained my first lessons in managing something bigger than myself. This was during my university years, where I was usually at a rehearsal or work session when I should have been in class. Everyone in the group was a student with three exceptions. We paid for a costume designer, a choreographer, and a director. In my role, I worked with all three, but our director, Milt Lyons, was the sources of the lasting lessons.

It was past midnight and we had just finished a full run-through of the show. The cast and crew were slumped in the theater seats as Milt was about to go through his notes of what worked and what needed fixing. I was on stage with Milt, standing just a little behind him and to his left. I was ready to jot down the notes that I needed to worry about and was thinking about what I needed to do as soon as he finished.

I was surprised by his first note of the evening. Or morning to be more accurate.

Milt deputized two cast members to escort me to my dorm and put me to bed. I handed my clipboard to my assistant and followed them. It was the first time I had left the theater in the preceding 120 hours. Twelve hours of sleep later, I was back.

You do some foolish things when you’re twenty. If you’re lucky, there are older and wiser heads to keep things from getting too foolish. I want the world to be orderly and under control. For all my grumbling about chaos and mess, I prefer to be around creation and creators. But that creative energy can be a distraction from responsibilities.

I was your classic bookworm growing up. Most of my free time was spent nose inside of some book. I had a teacher in about the 4th grade who challenged me to see how much of the World Book Encyclopedia I could get through whenever I was done with my other classwork. I made it through by year’s end; probably with time to spare.

This was one of the few sources of friction between my parents. My Dad would often push me to set my latest book aside and connect with the actual world. My mother gave me free rein. I once asked her why she took my side in this struggle. She said,

You were compelled to read. I didn’t know what was driving you but I could see that it was something you had to do. I decided it was more important to let you follow your own curiosity than try to tell you what you ought to be doing.

Depending on what you choose to read, you can learn a lot about the wider world. I gobbled up science fiction and science related non-fiction.

This is not a vein to mine if your goal is a deeper understanding of other people and human relations. The characters in most classic science fiction were pretty wooden. Add a daily 45-minute commute to an all-boys high school and my exposure to real people in real settings was constrained.

By the time I got to college I was behind. In catch-up mode and unaware that I was. In retrospect, I think there were a handful of people who took me on as a development project. Oblivious as I was, I was nudge-able. And nudged over time into something resembling a functional human being.

So, thanks to all those nudgers. You know who you were, even if I didn’t.

The fundamental rule of improv theater is “Yes, and…”. Making something good happen always starts with agreement.

I didn’t learn this rule until well into my career. One of my consultants suggested that Improv training might be a good idea for our people. Naively, but correctly, I agreed and we brought in Chicago’s Second City group to our next All Hands Meeting. It was the success that Rik had foreseen.

Looking back, it occurs to me that I’ve long operated by a version of this rule. Decisions that others often characterized as risky or brave seemed more a function of being willing to say “yes, and…” to life in general. I haven’t been following some master plan or overriding dream. I do think Pasteur was on to something with his observation that “chance favors the prepared mind.”

There are always forces that want to channel that preparation. Sometimes those forces are internal (or at least internalized) and you find those souls who always knew they were meant to be doctors or athletes or writers. There was some compulsion to travel a particular path. And the world is often a better place for all of us because of those individuals. Sometimes they benefit from a support environment that helps to reinforce and focus their focus.

My internal curiosity has never had that degree of sustained focus. And my external environment had enough other things to worry about that there was little external pressure to walk a specific path. As long as I was doing well enough, I had free rein to follow my curiosities wherever they led.

I got to “yes, and…” my way through a lot of experiences and gates. No master plan. just an openness to opportunities when they surfaced.

When I complain about addressing the mess, I think what I really need to acknowledge is that the mess is where those opportunities lie. I suppose you can craft plans that avoid much of the mess. And, there’s a lot of advice committed in support of the value of plans over flexibility. Scripts are fine. But improv works too.

Although I can’t sing a note, theater somehow became an integral part of my college years and beyond. I did once audition for a high school play with the older sister of a classmate. No preparation, no idea what I was doing, but Kathy grabbed me by the hand and dragged me on stage. The result was predictable and less mortifying than it might otherwise have been given how little time I was given to react.

It did set me on a path. I became a stage manager. That’s the person responsible for keeping all the pieces moving in the same direction. While you’re rehearsing, your job is to keep the schedule, map people to rehearsal spaces, keep track of the decisions the director is making, and generally be aware of everything that is going on.

During performances the job remains much the same but the stakes rises. Are the actors in position for the next scene? Are the stage hands set to switch things in and out? Is the lighting crew ready for the next cue? You’re generally standing just off stage with an annotated script in front of you and a headset on connecting you to everyone in the crew. You’re also likely to be giving hand signals to other crew members for their next action.

To an outsider, backstage all looks like chaos. Another professional will look for the stage manager. If they are calm, the chaos is an illusion. When something goes wrong (pretty much always), the stage manager’s job is to remain calm while dealing with the problem.

How and when do you learn to manage chaos? One method is to have a passel of younger siblings. By the time I was nine, I had six of them. This turns out to be a very effective lab to learn how to separate signal from noise. And be given and earn responsibility. There’s always lots of noise trying to claim it is signal.

Another is to show up and stick around. Showing up is easy. Sticking around can be more of a challenge. Presence by itself won’t do a lot. You need to learn what matters and what doesn’t. Figuring that out can take time even with the help of others pointing things out.

Coming back to stage managing. The noise you do wait for is the applause after the final curtain falls.

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Excuse me?”

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

I was on a train traveling somewhere in the Boston-Washington corridor (many of the details are lost in a brain that struggles to recognize what is pertinent). I shifted my attention away from the book I was absorbed in. “That” turned out to be two young children bickering with one another a few seats in front of us. While the bickering had apparently been underway for some time, I hadn’t noticed and my failure to notice surprised the girl sitting across the aisle from me.

“I grew up with six younger brothers and sisters. I can ignore pretty much anything.”

This is one of those stories I tell about myself from time to time; often as a way to reveal something about me that I think is important.

What I think is important has evolved over time. I did indeed grow up in a noisy home environment and thought this story said something about my ability to concentrate. Many years later, when I began to suspect that ADD was a factor in understanding things I did well and things I struggled with, it became a story about hyperfocus.

Today, I wonder whether this was also a missed opportunity. Was this a bid for a bit of conversation and possible connection? I’m pretty sure I went back to my book. Actual humans are unpredictable. Books are safe. They can also be lonely.

I’m a Baby Boomer and a guy. That means I grew up largely without a vocabulary for emotions. If you don’t have the words, it’s hard to make sense out of certain things.

There were things that startled me like bugs and snakes. I learned that the spike in my heart rate and the shaking in my hands meant I was scared. When I was asked to get up in front of a group of people and speak, I wondered what that had to do with bugs or snakes. Was something making me afraid? Learned a new word. I was anxious.

Circumstances kept putting me in front of audiences. “Scared” was no longer the right word. Nor was “anxious.” The feelings remained similar. Raised heart rate, shaking hands. I needed a new word. The one I landed on was “energized.” I can’t tell you whether I chose it for myself or someone suggested it. A new word offered a new perspective. “Fear” and “anxiety” were things to avoid, “energy” was something to use and direct.

The words I chose could affect how my body responded.

This was not a connection I made quickly. I loved words so much that I was quite content to live inside my head. Connecting what was going on in my head with what was going on in my body didn’t occur to me unless my body’s reactions were adamant. Fine gradations of wording made sense. Learning that those gradations might map to equally fine gradations of feelings has been a long, slow, still incomplete, process.

My Dad served in the Navy during WWII. He was stationed in San Diego. After the war he returned home and completed an engineering degree at the University of Delaware on the GI Bill. After earning his degree he left Delaware and his family, ended up in St.Louis where he met my mother, and started our family. He chose to move half a continent away from his parents, a sister and several brothers, including his twin.

It was many years later before I learned that alcohol was one of the major drivers of his decision to leave. Dad was a very controlled guy. Funny and charming in a quiet Irish way but he liked a certain degree of order in this world. Control the environment and the world was a better place. Mom was more on the crazy side but those are stories for another time and place. His simple solution to deal with a family environment too fond of alcohol was to leave and create one that put alcohol in a better and much less central place.

I did drink in college and had the usual pleasant and unpleasant encounters. If there is a genetic component to alcohol abuse, I never triggered it. I had instead inherited some portion of my Dad’s preference for controlling my environment. As an aside, I don’t drink at all these days and haven’t for forty or so years. Again, a story for another time.

What’s on my mind today is the question of using the environment to establish control. Maybe it’s the Catholic notion of avoiding occasions of sin or avoiding temptation. The price of environmental control is that you don’t develop the internal controls and sensitivities to situations and circumstances that might prove more adaptive. If you’re quick-witted enough you can talk your way out of trouble when you’d be better served having to deal with the consequences of the humanly stupid thing you just did. If your brain is over-developed, your heart doesn’t get the exercise it needs to manage the complexities of the bigger world.