Did you ever wake up, think about something, and then have that very thing happen to you that same day? I have, a few times. Here’s a couple of work-related ones from the mid 1980s.

One morning, around mid-1985, I woke up in my bachelor apartment and thought “I bet I’m going to end up walking a truss today…” This was not totally out of thin air, as that day’s booking consisted of being on the local crew for a Paul Anka gig at the Toronto Sheraton. But, I was an audio tech, at the time part of a five person co-op of other audio techs, and some or all of us had been booked through a start-up crewing agency to do this gig.

In any case, I got up, showered, had breakfast and headed downtown to the gig without giving the truss walking thing a second thought. I got to the venue, the Grand Ballroom, and stood around with all of the locals in a loose knot. Someone from the Anka crew came over and said, “You, you, you, and you are on audio, go with him (one of their audio crew), You, you, you, and you are on lighting, go with him” …and so on through staging, backline and all departments.

I ended up being one of the “you’s” on the lighting crew. Now, here’s the thing. I was not wearing a T-shirt that said, “Kiss me, I’m a lighting guy!” or “Strand Century Dimmers” or anything that would have made me a likely candidate for the lighting crew… it was just a random choice.

Anyway, I was certainly familiar with lighting and knew my way around well enough to not embarrass myself or hurt anyone, so I shrugged and got to work. And, a few hours later, when the rig was in the air, I became the “you” that was detailed to focus the front truss…

I’m just going to pause here for a note to our younger readers: DO NOT DO ANYTHING THAT I AM ABOUT TO DESCRIBE HERE, IT’S DANGEROUS, AND ALWAYS WAS. Anyone who is old enough to remember when this was a daily occurrence is probably also, like me, too old and stiff to actually do it now.

Old-School Thoughts

The front truss was ground supported on Genie Super Towers, one on each side of the stage. It was probably 40 feet, maybe 48 feet in length and made up of sections of 2-foot square box truss. My job was to climb the stage-right tower and get myself on top of the truss, and then point the lights. There was no truss ladder, no personnel lift, and no safety harness involved. The way there consisted of pulling oneself up from one section of the lift to the next. These were laid out like stairs, except that the vertical rise for each “stair” was 5 or 6 feet, and the “step” was about 2 inches deep… just enough to get a toe onto.

Once on top of the truss, the task was to point each fixture to the desired area on the stage, as indicated by the LD (lighting designer). I can’t remember now whether or not there were “theatrical” lighting fixtures like Lekos, which have four shutters and an overall focal length adjustment (all manual) and Fresnels, which have the focal length adjustment, and sometimes external shutters, or just the standard PAR-64 lighting fixtures of the day.

The difference would be how much actual adjustment, besides the initial positioning, would have been involved. With the PAR cans, the only other adjustment involved rotating the sealed-beam bulb inside the fixture, something that involved reaching into the open back of the “hot” (in both senses of the word) light.

In any case, I successfully made my way halfway across the truss doing the described procedures before encountering an obstacle. The Grand Ballroom was designed to divide into two not-so-grand ballrooms by means of an air wall which ran down the center of the room. All of the infrastructure for the airwall was built into a valance that projected downwards from the ceiling about 3 feet, running the length of the room. In order to get a decent trim height on the front truss, it needed to be raised right up against the bottom of the valance, which was in turn, blocking my path to the other side.

I suppose the sensible thing to do would have been to make my way back the way I came, climb down the stage right Super Tower, walk over to stage left, climb that tower and finish the focus. However, at the time, I was a skinny, wiry little cuss, so the natural thing to do (or so it seemed to me in the moment) was to limbo down into the truss, crawl through the section that passed under the valance, and then crawl back on top on the other side. Which is what I did and then finished the focus and climbed down the stage left tower. And that was it – I’d walked a truss.

The only other thing I recall from that gig is that a few of us were hanging around front-of-house, talking to Paul’s audio tech. At the time, console mute groups were a very new thing (the first ones I saw were on a Yamaha PM3000, which had just come out). This show had a very big Soundcraft console and some of us were marveling at the row of mute group buttons by the master fader.

The sound tech then ruefully told us about a recent show… there’s was a cue in the show wherein every single mic on the stage was muted except for Anka’s (probably during “My Way”). The cue duly came and he pressed the mute group button for it, but when the cue passed, the desk wouldn’t come out of that cue, leaving one input on and the other 47 off – awkward! And, no, I don’t remember hearing how that got resolved.

Fore!

A year or so after this, I woke up one summer morning and the first thought that popped into my head was, “I wonder why you don’t hear about more people being injured by getting hit by golf balls? I, mean, those little suckers are hard, so you’d think they’d do some damage if you got hit by one.”

I don’t play golf, never have; I don’t watch golf; and I don’t follow it either. The only explanation that I can offer as to why I had this random thought is… in my younger days, I had aspirations to become a cartoonist. For that reason, I was always happy to look at “the funnies” in the local paper (Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” was huge at the time), and it being summer, lately there had been several golf-themed cartoons that had appeared.

At this time, I was still with the audio co-op, so after breakfast, I got into my recently acquired “dream car,” a 1982 Toyota Landcruiser jeep, and drove down to the office. I was the only one of the five of us there that day, everyone else being out on gigs.

Around 10:30, the phone rang, a call from a recording studio in the far northeast part of the city. Did we have a certain piece of outboard gear available for a mix session that day? I don’t recall what the piece was, but we’d been doing a pretty good business renting them things like Yamaha REV7 reverbs and the odd compressor. We had one – when could they pick it up? They were already mixing – could we deliver it? Sure, for another 40 bucks. That settled, I pulled the unit, did up a rental contract, looked up the location of the studio in my handy map book (on paper – this was years before Google maps) and jumped in my jeep.

It was a beautiful summer day. About half an hour later, I was driving up Kennedy Road in Scarborough, nearing my destination, window down, enjoying the breeze when, tunk! I heard, and kind of felt, something hit the back left fender of my jeep.

Startled, I looked in the rear-view mirror just in time to see a golf ball bouncing away along the pavement. A quick glance to my left showed that behind the tall, ivy-covered fence was a golf course (or maybe a driving range). And how about that? What were the chances and what random coincidences did it take to put me in that exact spot, at that exact time? Crazy.

Now, there are a million self-help guides out there that will tell you, for various reasons, to begin each day with positive thoughts. I’m going to come out in support of that idea for a new reason: it’s probably safer.