I’ve spent more than half my life working in theatre. I did my first show as an actor at 16, which would be 22 years ago now. I auditioned for that show because I thought the teacher directing the play was hot, and there were cute girls in it. I got the male lead in Up the Down Staircase, and a career somehow sprang from that. I was one of the two or three best actors in my high school, so I figured when I went to college I’d have no problem getting cast in a show.

Except that everyone there was the best actor in his or her high school, and a lot of them had way better high school programs than I had. Some of them had more than one drama class in high school. And some of them did more than one show each year. Some schools even had a teacher for nothing but drama! To say I was behind the curve would be putting it mildly. But I auditioned, and I took classes, and I worked, and I didn’t get cast.

Then I ran into my buddy Clark, and he changed my life with a simple question – “Do you want to run spotlight for this show for me?” Clark was the Technical Director at Winthrop when I started there, and I had come from another audition where I didn’t get cast. Clark and I knew each other from working together on weekends at the museum in Rock Hill, SC. I helped out with the front desk and gift shop, and Clark worked in the planetarium. So when he saw me wandering around the theatre building, he offered me a gig running spotlight for the show.

And that’s where it all started for me. I had fun running the spot, and I felt like I was part of something for a change. At the time I was an English major, which is a fairly solitary endeavor, so the feeling of working together with a bunch of people to get something done was really welcome. The theatre folks welcomed me with open arms, probably because they were (and still are) as weird, awkward and dysfunctional as I was (am). So by the end of that year I had double-majored, gotten some small roles in shows, but more importantly I had discovered a whole new world. A world that over the next twenty years would feed my family, buy my house, my cars, send me all over the country, and eventually turn me into a professional writer.

That year I joined a brotherhood that I’ve strayed away from for while, but always find myself drawn back into it. We’re the ones in black, with tools hanging from out belts, probably with tattoos and piercings, and we might look more like a motorcycle gang than highly skilled professionals in an extremely technical field, but we’re the people you want on your side when it absolutely, positively has to get done right away. We’re rude, crude and obscene. We drink too much, eat too much greasy food, frequently have unreliable relationships with barbers and razors, but we can make sure that the show happens right, and happens on time, and then gets the hell out of our building so we can go drink. We’re technicians.

We’re not “techies.” A “techie” is a high school kid running props for extra credit. A “techie” is an actor who might be able to run the light board if everything is programmed for them. A “techie” is someone who you’ll let help push road cases but you’d never trust them to stack motor boxes in the back of a semi with you. I haven’t been a “techie”for a couple decades now, and I’m pretty damn quick to correct anyone who tosses that term around.

We’re techs, stagehands, crew, technicians, squints, squeals, riggers, truss monkeys, wood butchers, sparkies, board ops, spot ops, deckhands, truck trolls and a thousand other names that we’ve given ourselves. But you might not get to use those. Nicknames are like kid brothers – I can beat the shit out of mine, but you’d better not even look at him funny.

We’re brothers and sisters in black, a family forged in the backs of tractor-trailer trucks and in the high steel. We’re the people who make your entertainment happen, and without us, your favorite performer naked on a bare stage in the dark and no one can hear them whine about it. No matter how long I’m out of the business, or just tangentially attached to it, I can walk into a theatre with a black shirt, gloves and a crescent wrench and step right back into that world. I’m not nearly as nimble as I once was scurrying up a rope ladder to focus a front of house rig, but I’m still able to get into the back of a truck and sling a lot of steel.

I was reminded this week of what it means to be part of that brotherhood, because we lost another on of our own here in Charlotte. Ironically,I met Chris Burchett when neither one of us were doing much stagehand work. I was selling him lighting gear as he was the tech director for a local private school. We weren’t friends, really, but buddies. Acquaintances. The guys who shake hands and catch up briefly when you work a gig together every three or four years. But in the sense that he was one of us – the crew, he was my brother. And I’ll miss him. Being a theatre technician in a small community like Charlotte is very much a John Donne kinda thing – each man’s death diminishes me. I’m diminished by Chris’ passing, as is our whole brotherhood. And even though the audiences will never know it, backstage there is a void.

Vaya con Dios, Chris. You are missed.

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