Erik was definitely a leg man.
He looked for Leo, and found him coiling cables at the side of the stage with a dark-haired boy in a flannel button-down shirt. Leo tossed Erik a hank of cable without preamble and made introductions. “This is David Alto, he’ll be running lights for the concert, consider him the sorcerer. David, this is Erik. Consider him the apprentice. Finish these up and take him back in the booth, show him the boards. You got about twenty minutes before the madness.”
David and Erik shook hands and after dealing with the cables, headed back up the aisle to the glassed-in booth at the back of the auditorium. It was four feet wide by eight feet long, with lighting consoles along two-thirds of the raised counter. Two captains’ chairs sat before the consoles, each with a headset hooked over one arm. Clipboards holding design schematics and cue sheets hung neatly. Mason jars of pencils, all sharpened, perched on the counter. Wires and cables, neatly taped, snaked overhead and underfoot, turning precise corners around and through things.
It was a tighter, cleaner ship than Erik had been on in high school. Clearly childish things had been put away and no one would be getting laid here. Still, a little quake of excitement touched the back of his neck and he took a pencil, spun it through his fingers as David gave him the short tour.
“Equipment’s kind of kludgy. You work boards like these before?”
“Looks sort of the same. You write out the cue sheets or is it computerized?”
“Nothing in this place is computerized, but they’re going to bat for us in the next budget, I hear. I worked a sweet system at SUNY Purchase over the summer, all computers. Coming back here is like working with candles.”
Through the glass booth Erik watched Leo Graham direct a band of techs in bringing out the boom stands—long poles with crossbars, to be hung with fixtures and set in each of the stage’s four wings. “I’ve never rigged booms.”
“Booms are key when you’re lighting dance. In fact if it came down to a choice between four lanterns on booms and forty overhead, Leo would take the four on booms.”
“Really?”
“The booms are the bitches, my friend,” David said. “It’s one of the sayings around here.”
“Does Leo use any overhead lighting?”
“Sure.”
“How many bars?”
“Just two. We get to the downstage one with a cherry picker, and there’s a catwalk upstage. I’ll show you later. You access the house lanterns from the balcony. It’s a little hairy up in the ceiling, do you mind heights?”
Erik smiled. “I’d be in the wrong business, wouldn’t I?”
The noise level in the theater was rising as more and more dancers arrived. Erik hadn’t encountered them much within Mallory, for the studios were all on the third floor while the tech theater students roamed like rats in the building’s basement. Bumping occasional shoulders in the student lounge had been the extent of his contact with the dance students. Pensively he watched the full gathered company. They stretched in the aisles, limbered up at the edge of the stage or hanging on the grand piano. Girls in leotards, long-legged and sleek, their hair pulled up revealing slender necks and sculpted shoulders. The boys were just as sleek, some prettier than the girls, loud and flamboyant, indiscriminately touchy-feely.