Three excerpts from 'Reaching Out ~ Reaching In'
Page 112:
(Many of us will at some time have attended an evening celebration in a packed village hall in a rural community. Many of us will therefore already have met ‘Big Al’ – the guy with a lifetime’s experience of the ‘know-hows’ in theatrical presentation … A hushed silence descends. Taran, the guest speaker, is ready to speak)
‘Outwardly, Taran looked calm and relaxed as he sat on a high stool - which I recognised as having been borrowed from Miriam’s kitchen, while in front but slightly to the side of him stood an oak lectern, which held his notes. High above, Al Say had fixed a single spotlight to shine down on him, and I remember thinking how much younger he looked with his face in part shadow.
Behind him, there stood three very large but portable black screens – slightly illuminated by a single side lamp, framing the ‘Set’ to give the impression of a theatre stage. Without a real stage to manage, Big Al had re-titled himself, ‘Lighting Director and House Audio Technician,’ and the only hiccup of the evening came just as Taran started his introduction.
First, the p.a. system produced an ear-piercing stratospheric screech followed by an excruciatingly painful downward glissando to a note so low and so loud as to be almost beyond both the hearing and endurance capacity of man. Then no sooner had that agony subsided, than Alf Crabtree – the chairperson of the group – who was leaning against the bar alongside us, holding the last drops of a pint of his own strong homebrew in his hand, added to the calamity by shouting coarsely, ‘House Lights!’ Big Al’s moment had arrived:
Dressed in tight fitting black trousers and black polo neck top, but with freshly blacoed white plimsolls to his feet, his painfully thin six foot six figure lurched forward from the lighting control console to the side of the hall. On reaching centre-stage, he gave Taran his clipboard script to hold while he rapidly adjusted the height of the microphone downwards, bending so much as to take his huge frame out of the view of all but the front two rows. After ‘testing’ it in a deep dramatic ‘stage voice’ he counted slowly, one to ten and then asked whether the people at the back could hear. The silence which followed his enquiry seemed to satisfy him. All that remained was to re-adjust the microphone back upwards to its original height. Not without reason was ‘Big Al’ called ‘House Audio Technician’.
On reclaiming his clipboard – which he tucked neatly under his arm in true military fashion, he then raced, rather than marched, to the opposite side of the auditorium – next to the Fire Exit door, and switched off the house lights.
Outside, the moon shone brightly in a sky of a million stars, but such was the thickness of the old and smelly black velvet curtains draping the small windows that darkness in the hall was total. And it was at this point that things became even more complicated and trying for dear Taran. Indeed, it was at this point that things became more complicated and trying for all of us.
Now I have always been of the opinion that when one walks either in or out of a room and changes the lighting circumstances of that area – putting a light on in darkness, or, as in this case, switching a light off to produce darkness, one should wait a moment or two, err on the side of caution, so that the eyes can readjust and become acclimatised to the change. This, Big Al did not do.
However, in Big Al’s defence, I feel I must remind his critics - as I tried to in the pub afterwards, that for his return journey, there was little if any light available in that area of the hall.
Someone in the pub even suggested it might have been his height that gave him this visual disadvantage: that the distance between his eyes and his feet was greater, and that therefore it was more difficult to see from up there. At least one person nodded approvingly to this. Fortunately for me my eyes had adjusted rather rapidly. And having that owl-like advantage I feel well positioned to tell it as it actually happened. First of all, I think it is important to note that events happened rather quickly, one after another. For me, the clue to it all lay in Big Al’s plimsolls. And had I not noticed those plimsolls earlier on, I doubt I should be in this informed position now.
From my vantage point, as soon as he he’d switched off the house lights, I could see nothing at all of Big Al … except those brightly glowing plimsolls, which seemed to bounce their way back in an ill-defined diagonal line – giving one the impression of a person cautiously crossing a raging river torrent on widely-spaced and treacherously slippery stepping stones. But I do concede, as I did in the pub afterwards, that, eyes down, he was perhaps more guided by the luminosity of his own feet at this juncture than by the availability of visual clues to his surroundings.
And, as I also tried to explain (quite unsuccessfully) to Taran, it was possibly the preoccupation with his plimsolls, which caused Big Al to trip on one of his own wires, and finish up seated on Mrs. Crabtree’s well-endowed lap at the end of row one. Indeed her yelp of pain caused Mr. Crabtree to switch on a wall side light next to him, so that from then on everyone could witness the scene.
Now I know that, as Taran later railed, this really should have been the end of the affair, and, as I also agreed, Big Al – while still seated on her welcoming lap – their eyes locked, their faces barely an inch apart, should not even have attempted to rearrange her large brimmed hat by pulling it forward and down with such ferocity. And he most certainly should not have declared – in a voice loud enough to be heard in Peru, that he was, ‘Dashed sorry, old girl’ and so forth. But, as later I was forced to remind Taran; in these circumstances it is so easy to be wise after the event … Either way, I wholeheartedly agree, as I did in the pub, that Big Al should certainly not have extended the whole affair by making further apologies to Mrs. Crabtree – who was only in that exposed position because it was her task to propose the vote of thanks at the end of the evening. But apologise further he did.
His error now was not his preoccupation with his plimsolls, but that he walked backwards, in an undetermined line – demonstrating once again what little part spatial awareness played in his life. And I suppose everyone in the auditorium foresaw the catastrophe and held their breaths in anticipation.
The moment did indeed arrive. This was theatrical slapstick at its very best for, with his final bow of apology to Mrs. Crabtree, Big Al’s right elbow bumped the lectern sufficiently hard to send Taran’s six sheets up, high into the air, ingeniously performing – as I learned later in the pub, an impressive display of aerobatics as they did so. Taran was even overjoyed by the sound of the oak lectern as it bounced more than once on the tongue and groove floor.
I doubt anyone else viewed the happening aesthetically. I saw a demolition job. I saw only the embarrassment of witnessing his valuable sheets hit a high point above the stage area then disperse to settle in their chosen resting place on the hall floor. But, I think we should grant him his opinion.
As he made plain after his second pint, he was actually thrilled by the way the papers dispersed themselves, claiming that ‘The whole distribution process of the papers was a once in a lifetime spectacular,’ where the release of the gliding objects coincides with extremely favourable air movements and draughts. His experience as a glider pilot and instructor allowed him to see things differently to the rest of us I suppose.
Between thirsty sips, he took great delight in telling us that page one, did a ‘Stall Turn,’ while page two apparently managed a ‘Tail slide’. Page three, made a brave effort, but despite its striving still failed the intended ‘Loop.’ Page five meanwhile performed an exquisite ‘Chandelle’ – where it rose up to its natural maximum climb height, then at that point breathtakingly carried out the prescribed ‘U’ turn, before finally descending back to the runway.
He was strangely silent for a moment after telling us why page four collided with the Victorian radiator next to the fire-door exit – a disaster, a sad accident, due either to a weak stress-point in the paper’s manufacture or to the uneven distribution of ink on the page. But apparently page six of his talk – though admittedly not the most spectacular of his flying circus, was presumably the cleverest, for the paper’s undisturbed speed kept it in ‘Ground Effect’ mode, where it travelled evenly in the direction of the audience, no more than an inch or two above the floor.
On seeing the sheet racing directly at her, Mrs. C. – who as a result of Big Al’s earlier clumsiness was still massaging her left toe, raised her other leg – in a manner Taran thought quite unladylike, allowing the ‘Ground Effect’ mode to continue under her seat, until the paper finally performed a perfectly graceful touch down on the perimeter of row four. I know of no one else who saw it quite as he did.
But in the hall, that moment marked the point at which the …’