Zamboni

Today I drove the Zamboni for the first time.  I wasn’t really expecting it at all… Junior (another Stage Staff) drove it onto the ice so I went to get my shovel to do my usual duty of cleaning up the snow, when he gets off and tells me to get on and go for a couple dry laps (no scraping/water) just to get the feel of driving it.  It was important that I do some practice first because first of all, you can’t stop and start during ice cutting/making (Once you start, you must keep going until you’re done; otherwise it makes the ice uneven) and second: the rink is surrounded on 3 sides with glass dashers.  I presume the glass is fairly strong, but it’s not plexi and I can tell that some of the panels have been smashed and replaced because the glass colour is slightly different from the others.  When cutting the ice, you have to get quite close to those glass panels so would be very easy to collide with them if inexperienced.

The whole thing went a lot more smoothly than I had hoped though.  After those few practise rounds, they told me to put the blade down and start cutting the ice.  From then on I think my Canadian blood kicked in and it was smooth sailing (no pun intended).  My production manager was pleased and said I was a true Canadian, haha.

When I’m the Studio B duty tech for the first time next week set up my camera and film the ice resurfacing process.   The duty tech is the person who gets called when things go wrong and it rotates between the 3 of us stage staff each week.  They are also responsible for doing most of the ice scrapes & makes as well as doing food pick ups.  Essentially food pick ups take place on nights when the ice or dance cast will be performing late.  Since the dining areas will be closed before they finish the late show, we pick up food for them from the galley and deliver it to the theatre for them so that they can eat there when the show is over.  So that was something a little surprising about my job, that I will be visiting the galleys on a regular basis.  I just hope I can find everything when it’s my turn to go.  I went with Leslie last night and he showed me where I need to go to pick up each item.  They have about 10 things on their list and we have to visit 6 different areas to pick them all up (and then have to hope that we can get to the theatre with the hot items still hot).

As my first week has drawn to a close, I’ve decided that I will definitely enjoy this job.  It looks like I’ll have plenty of free time to work on training to be a lighting technician in the future (I’m really hoping we don’t have much to do for dry dock… that seems like an ideal time to sit in the lighting booth and get some learning done).