Where in the world am I today?: North Vancouver, BC, Canada

I’m in the middle of a prop building blitz at the moment as I try to get things in place for a new show that I’ll be debuting in a couple of months… A couple of months??? What’s the rush in trying to get it all together now? Well I’ve got a rather busy schedule in June, July and the beginning of August, so my best bet for getting everything done is to have as much done as possible in May and if possible, June. I’m building a show around three stunt parodies and my partner in crime for this show is a six inch long stuffed Hot Dog that I’m calling Willie.

I’m a huge fan of giving myself more time than I actually need or think I’m going to need to get jobs done because my experience is that something inevitably goes sideways… This week for example, I set out to pick up a couple of costume pieces at a used tuxedo shop that I’d been to a number of times. I drove out to Richmond (about a 45 minute drive from where I live) and when I got out there I was dumfounded to discover that the shop had closed down… What? How could they? They didn’t ask me or anything… Well a day of pondering and I ventured over to ebay and found a reseller of used tux stuff there, so hopefully I’ll be able to order everything off the internet… We’ll see…

The other night I got together with my next door neighbour who’s got a fantastic wood working shop to work on a piece I wanted built for Stunt #2 – The High Dive of Death… I’ve got a 12 foot telescoping ladder that I’m attaching a mini diving board to and will have Willie dive from the board into a mere wet sponge… The stuff of legend’s I tell you! So initially I just clamped a saw to the top run of the ladder to see if it would work thinking that I’d eventually replace the saw blade with an actual piece of springy steel… A trip out to the Metal Supermarket out in Burnaby later and the guy behind the counter suggests that I just take the saw blade into a machine shop and have the teeth cut off… It’ll be cheaper and it’ll work… Right… So a trip to my favorite machine shop and they confirm that yes they’ll be able to make the modifications… Right… Before I hand over the saw blade I need to also build a piece of wood into the equation that can handle some additional hardware for a release mechanism for the diving board so it can actually sprong to life on command…

Yesterday was all about the construction of the Willie Cannon Mark II. This required a trip out to a special plumping supply shop to pick up an additional 2 1/2 inch coupling joint and a bunch of time spent cutting and shaping PVC pipe and a trip to the local tire store to have a valve stem installed… Next came the glueing it all together process which was a bit trickier than I would have liked. I wrote to a friend afterwards expressing my frustration with only being about a quarter as good as I’d like to be on the construction side of things, but how great it is to be building things myself… I have to wait about 24 hours to see if the air pressure chamber is actually air tight, so I’ve got my fingers crossed that it works. If not… Well I’ll go buy the ten or twelve dollars worth of bits and piece and spend the time to do it again. I can say with out a doubt that if I do have to do it again the second time around will go more smoothly than the first, but I’m hoping that the first time around version works…

Like I said near the top I like to give myself lots of time in case things go sideways…

It’s a both rewarding and gratifying to see the bits and piece of the show coming together, but on the flip side I sometimes find myself wondering if anyone apart from me will find this silly premise of a show as much fun as I’m hoping it’ll be to perform… I’m buying, building, writing, creating with the hope that it’s going to work, but who knows if it will. Ah the joys of show business and boldly going where you’ve never gone before…

Yahoo… Preliminary tests indicate that we have air tightness in my first attempt with the air pressure chamber… Happy Good Good!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 12:01 am and is filed under Performance, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.