This will be a two parter today, I’ll separate out costume and art stuff so this post isn’t quite so massive.
So last week/this weekend was very busy while we were getting ready and finishing things up for the Sgt Pepper show. Friday night took a break to watch the RPDR finale (Yay!) then back at it – Saturday morning got up, headed on out to my parents’ house to help mom finish up dad’s jacket…
Mom did most of it over 3 or 4 days, I just helped with some of the finishing. I was going to make some epaulets but we realized they might get in the way of his guitar strap, so we scrapped those.
Then we headed on to the theater to start setting everything up. And I was SUPER SUPER SUPER EXCITED because the show was being played at the Ruffin! If you’ve read my blog for a while you know I love the Ruffin and love to tell ghost stories about it. We spent multiple summers straight there – myself and my cousins would play and amuse ourselves while our parents had their play practice. Well this is the first time I’ve been back there since… probably 98 or 99. Of course as soon as we got there I took off running and looking in every spot I remembered, seeing what had changed, what was still there. And taking a ton of photos since I didn’t have any before.
First off the lobby is SO much smaller than I remembered. Years of playing in that lobby as a kid, it seemed so much bigger in my memory.
The ticket booth we played in a lot. As long as it was still light out, we would pretend to be ticket takers or whatever.
The scary bathrooms up front still had the same sign.
And it doesn’t look like they’ve been updated at all.
Yes I took a photo of the ladies’ room. Because I had to share my cousins – at one practice, for whatever reason, there was another kid there who was CRAZY. But he wouldn’t leave us along and was terrorizing us, trying to scratch us and kick us. So we ended up hiding in the ladies room and barricaded ourselves in there. Including David. That kid was crazy! He never came back thank goodness. Dunno why he was there.
The concession booth – it was always locked during practice but you could easily slide in through the “windows.” We would slide in there to play and we got yelled at once and didn’t do it anymore š
Ok this is the stairway up to the prop room. Of course we wanted to play in the prop room but once it got dark it was incredibly scary to go up there. Especially because of the very dark closet you had to pass on the way in there. So my cousins would always make me (the oldest) run past the closet to turn the light on the prop room.
The creepy closet:
The Prop Room:
That’s where we saw the mannequin move, on the other side of the frosted glass. At that time the door to that room was completely blocked off with boxes. This is the sparse-est I’ve ever seen this room.
I love all the deco touches.
The creepy little “Being John Malkovich” door in there:
The auditorium. Please, Ruffin, never remove the giant swirls!
Didn’t get a lot of photos of the downstairs dressing room – it had changed a lot! They’d built a new entryway right next to it, too, and redone the entire dressing room so it’s not anything like it used to be. Much less creepy now LOL
This section was still the same.
And the stairs down hadn’t changed:
The “Gateway to Hell”/Silent Hill bathroom down there is gone, there’s some nice changing stalls instead. The massive pipe that used to cut across the room is gone, and they’ve finished out that whole area into more dressing/storage space. Nice!
The catwalk behind the stage where we once had the weird lights on/lights off experience:
(I can’t remember if that story is in that post I linked above or not.)
The “other” dressing room backstage. We didn’t go up there a lot because it was usually one person’s dressing room. Plus, roaches.
But both Ash and I remember it being WAAAAAAAAY higher up than that. Either it shrunk or we got bigger.
Outside:
Outside of the ticket booth:
Ok enough reminiscing. Onto the show!
Hung the banner I painted up in front of the stage:
I had a partner-in-crime named Nina who helped me punch up the banner. While I brightened up the letters with some lighter red paint, she added some more flowers, swirls and curls. Really helped make the sign pop.
We also decorated the stage with fabric, scarves, beads, butterflies, lanterns, lights, etc that we had on hand.
Then we settled in for the show. It was great!
Dad took his coat off at intermission, he was worried the sleeve was ripping but it turned out he’d just popped a holding stitch at the shoulder. (It was also a little too warm!)
I didn’t take a lot of photos during the show; just watched!
Then it was time to strike the set.
Also something I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned – my grandparents had their first dates in this theater. There used to be “double wide” seats in the audience (they were still there back when we were hanging out, but they have all new seats now). They’d sit in the double wide seats when they went to see a movie.
We got the stage cleaned up, helped dad load up as much as we could, and headed home. It was a long day!
Sunday will be in part two…