I broke a wing...but the show went on.

Today was possibly to toughest opening night I have ever been through. I was up the night before until 3 fixing focus notes and rewriting some cues. I woke up yesterday morning with a cold. I felt horrible. My head was so heavy I thought I would tip over. I couldn't sleep in, however, because my primary console stopped booting up the day before, so I needed to get on the phone early with tech support to work it out. I didn't want to run opening night without a backup console running. I did get the console fixed in the morning, the memory needed to be reseated. The rest of the day went hot and humid, and I got some last minute things done, but was for the most part ready to go. About an hour and a half before showtime a massive thunderstorm blows in out of nowhere. We were having a hard time tracking it because the internet we were on was proving to be very unreliable. Our best guess was that we would be able to do the show, if we started late. We had to drop part of the tarp covering front of house because the rain was blowing at an angle. When the worst of the storm had blown over we decided to get the show rolling. It was about 9pm. The pageant president, President Renouf, got up on the stage to start the introduction. I couldn't put the followspot operators in the towers because there was still lightning in the area. I had prerecorded some submasters with stage areas to cover for such a problem. I looked down at the fader wing to orient myself to the subs, but it was dead. I restarted the console, but nothing. Now I was a little stressed, the show was starting, and I couldn't cover for the spots. After trying a little percussive maintenance I decided to run to the truck and see if I could find a backup wing. I believed I had heard we had one. I found it and ran clumsily with an awkward box back to front of house. I didn't dare plug the new wing in while the console was on, I don't know how that would work, and I couldn't afford another dead wing. I shut the console off again, plugged in the wing, turned it on and crossed my fingers. I was pleased to find that the wing booted up and worked. I was just trying to buy time until I could get the spots up into their towers. The lightning persisted until about half way through the show. A while after the last strike the sky suddenly went calm, and it seemed clear that the storm was done for now. I sent the spots up and made it through the rest of the show successfully. By the time the show was over I was exhausted. I came home and stumbled to bed. Thank goodness I got to sleep in this morning.

Well, here's an interesting update...The reason we couldn't get the weather was because North Korea conveniently decided to attack government web sites this week. Thanks for adding to the fun...