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THOSE WERE THE DAYS,
MY FRIEND...
By Kate Karns
When I come through the stage door of the Lakeside Little Theater into the cavernous backstage with its ropes and pulleys and multiple curtains, its lights and layered sets and floor plugs, I kind of get choked up remembering our old facilities on the second floor of the Chula Vista Club House. It had been a meeting hall with a platform stage: no lights, no curtains- more a place for a PTA meeting.
By 1971 some footlights had been installed and a couple of tomato can spots rigged up with coat hangers and extension cords. A light board grew backstage as "retired electricians" figured ways of turning the stage lights on and off without twisting a hot light bulb from atop a ladder behind a tilting set during a love scene in a Noel Coward play between two people who had forgotten how.
Then these miracles of sets were screwed down and propped up. Backstage, the cast had, a 3-foot area on each side of the U-shaped set and a one-foot path in back of it to the outside wall in which to dress. The leading lady would be buttoning up Murphy's suspenders as O'Brian would zip up the leading lady and the prop person fastened the collar button of O'Brian. If you left a shoe on one side of the backstage area, say where the make-up was being applied, and you had to make your entrance from the opposite side and the play was in progress, it was just too bad. The only way to retrieve that silver slipper would be to crawl, rump up, behind the set under that window that always seemed to look out on a "view of the city" or a "suggestion of an English terrace," making the audience wonder what part the "dog" out on the terrace would play in the end.
There was no water, so the make-up side had a bucket and a rather fragile curtain tacked about it for those desperate to relieve themselves. We never rehearsed every day. Every other day was the rule, never broken. We were all too busy being retired.
We who were there thought the performances were astonishing. Take that anyway you choose.
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