“We have a tray for you tonight,” said the assistant stage manager to Chad. “Everything is glued on to it, so it should be pretty easy to handle.”
For a scene in GCTC‘s production of Zadie’s Shoes, we needed an easy way to help tell the audience that they are watching people in a diner. The set design is conceptual as opposed to realistic, and so only the minimal amount of ‘setting-specific’ detail provided to define the location of scenes.
I have been employed as Chad, a character who does not actually appear in the script. I also appear as Sean, but Sean only has two scenes in the play and so I am available to work as Chad in the first act. Chad is quite a character. He is a rabbi who specializes in kissing his tallis but he only knows one Hebrew blessing, which he learned by rote. Since his rabbinical pursuits are therefore limited and do not pay very well, he moonlights as a waiter in a 40s Diner, as well as a fauxmosexual barista in a yuppie-cum-hipster coffee shop. He’s pretty good with handing people cups of coffee, and has managed to kiss his tallis on many occasions without injuring anyone, but his skills as a waiter are a little weak.
At the top of the diner scene, Chad has to set the stage by placing large menus on the table, serving a beer to a girl we later discover is not sleeping with Sean (Chad and Sean are close friends, but Sean is a little embarrassed by Chad because Chad is obsessed with eventually losing his virginity), and dropping a tray at the back end of a table that helps make the diner look like a diner. This occurs because this tray has a napkin dispenser, a ketchup bottle, a sugar dispenser, a vinegar bottle, and salt and pepper shakers glued to it, and all these things are “dinery”… aside from the gluing.
During rehearsals, Chad handled the menus and glass of beer pretty well. The beer went in one hand. The menus went in the other. Chad could march right up and drop them all on the table with astounding grace. Sometimes he would even wink at his hot blonde customer, since it has been proved that winking at customers helps with tips and can lead to dancing. But all that was before The Tray.
The Tray, the menus, and the beer required three hands, but Chad only has two. Chad, however, is a clever boy.
During the invited dress rehearsal, the assistant stage manager thought she would help by propping the menus between the sugar dispenser and napkin dispenser on The Tray. The arrangement looked very “dinery”. The gleaming, white laminated menus towered over the napkin dispenser, rising twice again as high as the chrome receptacle like colossal Triplet Towers gleaming on the skyline of Kitsch City.
“This is no sweat,” murmured Chad through wistful chews of mimed chewing gum as he planned the deployment of The Tray, beer, and menus. Chad is a good gum mime. “I’ll put the full glass of beer on The Tray, put The Tray on the table, then remove the menus and place the beer just in time for the lights to reveal me winking seductively at my blonde short-order ward!” When Chad had hair, he used to like to dye parts of it yellow because he thought it would help him lose his virginity. It didn’t. Now he wears a hat.
While ruminating on his lost hair, Chad heard his cue. He picked up The Tray. The Tray was a little heavier than he anticipated because of everything that was glued to it, so he used both hands. He began to mime the gum and practice his wink (“This one’s for YOU, Sarah Palin!” he would think; Chad’s last name is SixPack). The lights went down on the previous scene, and as Chad prepared to march up two steps to his destiny, the gleaming white Triplet Towers began to slowly bend and collapse under their own weight.
They leaned forward and drooped, picking up momentum. Chad leaned forward and drooped, knowing that he had no free hands but feeling certain that he could somehow resurrect the Triplet Towers with his chin. The perceived logistics of this are left as an exercise for the reader. Anyway, Chad’s chin failed. He forgot about his nonexistent gum, and stopped chewing. The Triplet Towers gently bent towards the full beer glass, and then gently tipped it over. Beer poured all over the beautiful black flooring backstage. The beer glass began to roll. Chad uttered a word unbecoming of an employee of a 40s Diner. There was some loud thumping as The Tray and the Triplet Towers clattered to the floor. The beer glass narrowly escaped a fracture. Chad’s apron was soaked right through to his groin. Brazenly, Chad marched up two steps, walking oddly because of his soggy underwear. He scowled unpleasantly at his pretty blonde customer, handed her a mostly-empty beer glass, and tromped off stage.
Chad failed.
The looks he got from the assistant manager and the slick union technician wounded Chad, even though he tried gamely to help with the cleanup. The ASM ran for paper towels to sop up the alcohol-free President’s-Choice-brand ambrosia, but Chad — who is (as it happens) genetically predisposed to a career in sanitation — found a dry mop by way of apology.
For the next crack at being a good waiter — the first preview performance — Chad had learned from his mistake. The Triplet Tower menus, he thought, should be placed under the tray so as not to allow them to exhibit flaccidity and interact unnecessarily with the non-alcoholic beer. The assistant stage manager, who had suggested this option two days earlier but whose suggestion had been ignored because Chad is a misogynist and the assistant stage manager is a female, agreed that this was a brilliant idea.
At the appointed time during that preview performance, Chad hoisted the tray, beer on board, into his arms. He fanned the menus out underneath it, chortling at his brilliance. The ASM rolled her eyes, but Chad didn’t see her do it. He mimed a larger piece of gum than the one he’d mimed the night before, masticating it into two pieces and then recombining them over and over in his mouth. He practiced his wink, hoping it appeared as magnetic as the winks Sarah Palin bestows upon Russia and working-folk like himself. He placed the tray on stage with a slickness that betrayed his inexperience, arranging the menus in front of his soon-to-be-betrothed (if only she knew!) as he simultaneously slid her beer to her. He winked suggestively at her and thought about something inappropriate. Then he exited the stage area and performed a touchdown dance in front of the assistant stage manager, proudly displaying the prominent lack of a puddle or soaked underwear (the fact that he had stopped wearing underwear because his only pair still smelled like beer is irrelevant). And five minutes later, as he cleared the tray, menus, and beer glass in the darkness at the end of the scene, he naively tilted the glass to one side in the darkness, and poured several inches worth of 0.5% high-test on to the backstage platform.
Chad had failed again.
Tonight, Chad has one more chance. One more preview. One more chance to net a pretty blonde girl who will let him play with the as-yet-unused tongue piercing he got in 2004. He has moved from spilling a whole beer to spilling a half a beer, and tonight Chad hopes to keep the backstage area completely dry. He may even get that cute girl’s phone number, even though plans on doing it by getting her to fill out a comment-card-slash-weekly-draw entry form. No matter. Chad can’t learn how to do things properly unless he has a chance to do it all wrong.
He may fail again, but Chad is okay with that. Chad loves his work, even though he is yet to be successful.
Earlier today, you see, Chad tried listening to CBC Radio for the first time. He hit the ‘seek’ button on the car stereo by accident, and couldn’t figure out how to get his classic rock station back again. At any rate, he was forced to catch the end of some lefty documentary-geeky program, and was hooked by a commenting cancer researcher named Dr. Tak Mak. “Our job,” this prize-winning scientist said, “is to fail. And fail, and fail, and fail. And then, after eighteen fails, we win one battle. It’s just like turning over rocks: ‘Oh, there’s nothing here. Move on’; ‘Nothing here. Move on.’ But it’s the nineteenth one that makes up for everything else.”
Holy shit, Chad thought. This is good universal advice. This, he thought, may be good advice for Kris, and for artists in general.
“”If you can do that,” counseled Mak, “that’s the beginning. Because your whole life, you know, will be doing this failing and failing, but that one success makes it all worthwhile. if you can do that, and you can love it, then go ahead.”
