Cavalcade of Weight Bearing Trusses.

I was meeting with DSmith and going over all of the platforms and Special Effects platforms we'd rigged over the years. I had the pad of 17 by 22 inch paper out and was making quick sketches of everything. I started with the scaffolding rig we rented for Oliver over 20 years ago, though not for his production. I then drew out the bed for Once Upon a Mattress, the balcony, both versions for Romeo and Juliet. Smith reminded me of the fallen tree that swung out over the orchestra pit I built for Midsummer Night's Dream. There was a flying window, and a steel cage for Dracula, the entire stage revolved for The Importance of Being Earnest, By the time we were done I'd added a number of special platforms from The Secret Garden, and the yellow brick road from The Wizard of OZ, the stage extensions and traps for various shows, the 18th floor of a 20 story building for Delusions of grandeur (Also done twice.) If I were to do it again I drew out a design for a half story below where the action takes place where we'd see a cubicle worker working away completely unaware of what was going on just the floor above. Smith then reminded me of the set for What the Bellhop Saw, with window ledges upstage and the passage from behind the bed to the WC and off stage. (There was a comic chase where folks would appear to come through the same door repeatedly, then everyone would appear and run into the center of the room from doors they "couldn't have gotten to, as in just about every Scooby Doo episode.)
The stack of paper was getting pretty thick by this time. We started to go through the stack looking for solutions to the original problem we had set out to solve. Smith wanted to have a raked stage that cantilevers out over the orchestra area by about 6 feet. I was trying to explain how the standard wooden 2x4 construction we used for stage floors would not support his sets and actors safely, We would need to go to some sort of truss and counterweight design to achieve his goal.

Nan and I were crossing Lake Hodges on foot using the new pedestrian crossing. The crossing wasn't finished yet, so we had to detour onto the bike bridge. In doing so we had to jump a 1 foot wide gap. Unfortunately the gap is about 30 feet from the lake, and Nan wouldn't jump it. There was only a rickety span of chainlink below the gap for a "safety net" and chainlink handrail high fence across the gap. That seemed to make it worse than having nothing at all for Nan. I offered to walk her back to the freeway on ramp where she could wait for me to come back and get her. Finally she just closed her eyes and stepped over to me. We made our way to the other side and climbed down a tree to get to the marshy ground rather than stay on the bridge, which had become just an open grating for the last forty feet. Nan didn't have any trouble climbing down the tree, in fact, she's the one that suggested it. I'd have rather stayed on the bridge and not gotten all muddy, but there was no way Nan could have made that walk with the breeze moving all around. Even with her eyes closed she could tell we were well above the ground. We made our way back up to the parking area, then realized the car was on the other side of the freeway, at the trailhead. I ended up taking a shortcut across the foundations of the bridge pillars. I drove around and picked Nan up. She was hungry so we went for lunch. The dream was pretty much a normal Saturday or Sunday afternoon at that point, and I started wondering when something weird and dreamlike would happen again, but it never did. Just driving, lunch, buying cat litter and food (Left the coupon behind again.) What became just truly odd and a little bit trying was just how numbingly normal it all was. I kept worrying about the mud on our feet, but Nan was oblivious to it, as was everyone else but me. At one point I took off my shoes and wiped them more or less clean in the grass of a planter. Yep, pretty much just a normal weekend afternoon once we got off the bridge. I woke up tired again, fed the cats and laid back down for a couple of hours.

That dream was in the "I'm frozen, something is sitting on my chest and I can't make a noise either." mode. In our house I likely did have something fuzzy on my chest, like T-Rex, Miranda, Chloe Lumpkin, or Ginger, perhaps even more than one of the above. T-Rex came to my rescue by tapping me on the nose with his six toed paw, demanding to be let out, his kitty legs had been crossed long enough. One of the butlers forgot to clean his pans last night, and he is fussy about his litter pans. (Go figure, an animal that will root around in the stinking garbage for a snack or a toy is fussy about a litter pan that another cat might have used recently.)

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