I will now share one of my many interesting, but useless skills with you: I am a master bricklayer. This may seem like an applicable trait, but I could not tell you a thing about laying actual bricks. No, my expertise comes with a trade that is even harder to master and more torturous than placing individual bricks by hand. The title of this post, taken from 1984 and a famous English nursery rhyme, only captures some of the misery associated with my work.
I could build a skyscraper entirely out of fake plastic bricks using my experience from high school. These convincing plastic sheets formed the backbone of many of my stage crew program’s sets, and my work experiences with them would be some of the most painful, yet memorable times I had as a stage crew builder.
The easiest way to think of the brick is from the perspective of a puzzle. Each rectangular sheet has indents that the next identical piece can slide into, and sheets can easily be stacked on top of one another to build fake walls.
The problems with bricks begin when these sheets either need to be reshaped or mounted to surfaces.
This is how you reshape plastic brick sheets. The brick men use the program’s beloved table saw to cut down portions of the sheets for specific mounting points. This may seem like an uneventful process, but to increase your understanding of construction tools, I will now give a tutorial on one of the most dangerous saws in the shop.
Rules of the table saw:
- Don’t wear ties or lanyard while operating the table saw. The contraption can easily turn into a guillotine if the neckwear becomes trapped in the spinning blade.
- Wear eye protection: when a rogue piece of wood or plastic brick is blasted at your goggles like a bullet and blocked from your eyes by this thin sheet of defense, you will thank me.
- Wear ear protection: I am surprised that I was not deaf after using that thing without earplugs.
As romantic as the brick may seem from the audience, shaping it with a medieval torture device is far from this feeling. After long cut sessions, I would be covered in molten plastic shards that were thrown all over my face and clothes by the saw.
As I stated before, this was a sign of things to come.
Once each brick sheet was properly sized, they needed to be leveled with extreme precision while they were screwed into the frame. If the angle was slightly off, the wall would look crooked and the crew would have issues mounting additional sheets to the wall. I was a tedious process that I always happened to be assigned after cut duty.
I cannot put into words how much I hate working with fake brick. However, through these painful moments, I learned many lessons that would assist me throughout my time in stage crew and life as a whole.
- Precision and Patience are strong virtues in any form of work.
- Nothing is as bad as moving your hands inches away from a spinning blade and facing the possibility of becoming an amputee or headless.