via Props

We had dinner last night with twelve puppeteers, only three of whom spoke English as a native language. It was this great wide ranging conversation about art and connection.

Today we performed twice, which went well. I got to see the short film series Heather Henson curates, Handmade Puppet Dreams which I’ve been wanting to see for a couple of years now. Here’s one of the pieces, Incubus by Lyon Hill.

Before you watch this, you need to know that these are puppets and are being performed in real time. I tell you this, because otherwise it looks like animation or photoshop. No. Puppets.

See! Totally inspiring.

Afterwards we went out to dinner and I just…I’ve really missed this. Puppeteers talk about their in ways that writers don’t. I mean, we’ll sit around and say, “I’m thinking about doing this one man show…” and everyone will join in this collaborative discussion without (most people) without ever trampling on the other person’s vision. I love writing, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve missed collaboration.

Anyway, it was a wonderful weekend.

This particular rental house doesn’t mind if I give their furniture “a little love” so the white scars were acceptable. Most rental houses don’t want you to do anything to their props. Rightly so.

While we were renting out the Little Shop of Horrors puppets, the number of times they came back with horrendous “repairs” or “enhancements” that took a lot of labor to undo.

Just a note: When renting props, unless you have specific permission in writing from the prop house, don’t do anything to the props that you can’t completely undo. And make sure you undo it before returning the prop.

For this, since the practical antique value of the piece is gone, I was able to take the easy route. I mixed up two tones of paint to match the wood tone. Using a stiff bristle brush, I worked it into the gorilla glue, taking some care to match the grain of the wood.

Once I finished that, I gave it a once over with furniture polish and voila. A table that looks rustic, but not trashed.

So, all my Tuesday work was undone and it meant that Wednesday became about finding furniture. To make things crazier, one of the prop rental houses was in New Jersey and normally only an hour and a half away. It took me three hours to get there.  Upon arriving, my vehicle wasn’t large enough and I had to make two trips. I got about half an hour of sleep all told.

Thursday was the day of the shoot and I somehow managed to actually have everything there. Largely because I hired Emily DeCola to be a runner and do last minute shopping in the morning. It was an insane and brutal schedule that I don’t recommend.

Friday I spent returning props.

I am only now feeling human again.

(from The vaudeville theatre, building, operation, management, by Edward Renton, 1918)

“Resourcefulness” should be the middle name of the individual who is competent to occupy the position of property-man in a theatre. There are other important qualifications, but this one is essential. He may be called upon to supply anything from an Egyptian mummy to a three week-old child, upon a moment’s notice. He must be a bit of a carpenter, something of an artist, a great deal of a diplomat, and he must be “on the job” from the rising of the sun to considerably after the setting thereof-in other words, this is not the place for a lazy or a shiftless man.

via Props.

For the show, Night Sky, I was brought into the project very late, after the original propmaster had to depart. We had a tight budget and very little time to find furniture, which meant that I was shopping for shape, knowing that I could adjust the color later. The designer was very particular about wanting all the furniture to have the same chocolate brown finish.

As you see, this chair is honey maple. Now, if I had time and were going to do this right, I’d have stripped off the varnish at this point. But I found these piece the day tech started, so time was not my friend. I also don’t need it to look good forever.

What you see here is a test of some different color palettes. The one on the right side of the chair (bottom of the photo) is mostly burnt umber. The darker stripe is about half burnt umber and half mars black. I also tried a spray and a rag treatment, neither of which I liked.

For the final chair, I used a fluid satin acrylic “varnish” or medium to create a glaze. This allowed some of the original wood to show through for richness. That, combined with the brush strokes give a fairly convincing tightgrained wood. One of the tricks is to use a wide brush — in this case a three inch chinese brush for doing ink work — and long brush strokes. Any time you start or stop the brush it shows as a grain variation, so you have to either continue the stroke off the furniture or lift very smoothly.

The downside to this treatment is that it does scratch easily because it’s basically sitting on plastic. We’ve got a paint kit to do touchups, which is fairly easy, but it’s not something I’d recommend for a long run. With a long running show, taking the time to deal with the original finish would have been significantly more worthwhile. Or if this wasn’t a piece that was going to get a lot of wear, I could get away with this.

• 01:04 I’m at home after a day running around at the theater. #
• 14:29 I think I’ve done the last of the paperwork props for this show. Now to make the music of the spheres device. #
• 18:11 I arrived at the theater and there was a fire alarm going off. The fire department just arrived looking bored. #

• 10:22 Picked up a zipcar at 10 and am going to get a table and chairs for Night Sky. #
• 10:40 Astonishing. Parking in front of the building. #
• 10:40 The very nice French student and her father helped me get the table & chairs into the car. Now, to the theater. #
• 11:16 I have arrived at the theater and am not dead. Again, there is parking in front of the building. This is not normal. #
• 11:36 Dropped off the furntiture, extended the Zipcar res. And heading out for next load. #
• 11:42 Also sending designer reference photos while stopped at traffic lights, of which there are many. #
• 12:06 Ah ha. Now is the driving in circles looking for a spot, as expected. #
• 12:16 I’ll be double-parking, now. #
• 12:25 Furniture loaded and back to the theater. #
• 12:58 At theater. Found parking. Dropping furniture. #
• 13:08 Furniture dropped and off to return the zip car. Fascinating day, I know. #
• 13:21 On the car radio, 89.9 is playing the complete discography of Benny Goodman in chronological order for the next 16 days. #
• 13:39 Whew. I’ve dropped off the car and now have a little room for a breather before heading on the next errand. #
• 14:20 For those folks who wanted to listen to the Benny Goodman complete discography. 89.9 is streaming online bit.ly/Hkmj #
• 15:03 I’m laying out some of the paper props used in the show. Brochures and forms. #
• 15:07 I’ve got the aphasia lesson plans printing now. #
• 15:37 I’m printing flashcards of actors. #
• 15:39 Ugh. A brand new color cartridge and it’s not printing yellow. This is the third one that’s happened to so I think it’s the printer. #
• 15:53 I’ve emailed the flashcards to the office which will print them for me. Now, off to the floral district to buy fake asters! #
• 16:55 Fake asters don’t exist in NYC. I need another flower with a connection to the word “star.” Any ideas? #
• 17:08 Thank you all! I have aquired star jasmine. #
• 17:39 At the theater to drop off star jasmine, jewelry box and put alka-seltzer in a champagne bottle. #
• 21:57 10 alkaseltzer have the right boost, but priming the bottle without losing liquid is hard. #
• 22:01 Back into the bowels now. #

I got home around 1:00 am.

Truly? Because unless I’m building something interesting, the job is deadly boring. My posts would consist of, “Today I went shopping for paper, a box and a copy of King Lear.” At best. More likely they would say, “Today I went shopping and didn’t find anything on my list.”

The other reason is that when I’m really in full swing, as I’m about to be this week, I don’t have time to post at all. So it doesn’t say anything about the props ’cause I just don’t have time. Like, I’m heading into tech week starting tomorrow and I won’t surface again for another week.

And the last reason is that I don’t self-identify as a props master. I am one, but I identify as a puppeteer and more recently as an SF writer. The props thing feels like just a dayjob.

One of my favorite websites, Props, as a great article with a load of links on How to Research Props.  I highly recommend it. In particular, A History of Props: A Timeline of Props and Product Usage.

Clearly, my time management involves the need for a TARDIS. And yet I don’t have one.

Blogging will be, shall we say, extremely light this week.

EATING and drinking on the stage,” remarked the chronic theatregoer the other night, “always bores me when I have dined well and tantalizes me when I haven’t; but whenever I go to a theatre nowadays I am sure to find the people across the footlights either enjoying a big meal or pouring down tea or champagne early and often.”

It’s a pdf, but When Actors Eat and Drink Upon the Stage is worth checking out. If for nothing else, the wardrobe.

I picked him up in the evening and we went to dinner at Henry’s then downtown to see Avenue Q. At least… that was the plan. It was thwarted by the fact that our tickets are for Thursday, not today.

So, we went over to Times Square and saw Slumdog Millionaire which we both liked. Although it was not the Bollywood musical I think we were both sort of wanting.

“Yeah.” I continued to fold laundry as we chatted,because this was pretty simple stuff.  “A box of unlubricated condoms, KY jelly, food coloring, saran wrap and a little stage blood.”

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the phone and then she said, “Oh. I thought this would be a longer conversation.”  Another beat of silence. “I take it you’ve done entrails?”

“Oh, yeah.” I tucked the last pair of socks into the drawer.  “Had to do a disemboweling for a show.  Fun stuff.”

The crows now.  That’s going  to be  a much longer conversation.

I had a rehearsal this morning for a show that Jodi and I are doing on March 12th. It’s a very short piece which involves me being a dish, a fork and a bowl.  Jodi plays a spoon, a knife and a plate. The tension and high drama!  Actually, I think it’s a good little piece and I’ll post a link to the show information later.

I went straight from that rehearsal to a production meeting for a different show where I’m building some crows and a box of entrails.  Really, I have the best job.

Here are the much delayed and often promised pictures of the finish work on the lamb. As you might remember, I had to make significant changes to the taxidermy form. Once that was finished, I began covering the lamb with lambskin. I looked for a good fake fur version, but could only find them in black. Even from a distance, the fur is frequently the thing that gives the animal away, so I often wind up using real furn. This isn’t a pelt, mind you, so it isn’t shaped like a lamb. This means that I have to piece it together on the taxidermy form. Here I’m working on the leg and pinning the fur in place with thumbtacks while the glue dries.

As I work my way around the head, you can see both the foam taxidermy form and the way I’m piecing the skin together.

Once it is in place, I have to press the skin into the seam of the mouth. To orient you, the two divets above my fingers are the lamb’s nose. I widened the mouth area in the foam to allow space for the thickness of the skin. I’m using small nail to force the skin into place.

Here’s the lamb’s face with the fur in place, but untrimmed.

I’ve trimmed the fur, but not yet installed the eyes or finished painting it.

And here it is, completed and in the position that the director wanted it to be in for the show.

Ironically, during previews, the lamb was cut from the show. This happens sometimes with new plays, but it always amuses me when it does, because it is inevitably the most expensive prop.

Besides that today consisted of meetings, and then another meeting, followed by another meeting, plus some puppet building and prop construction.

I think bed might be in order.

To begin, I need to take the rods of the taxidermy lamb form that I’ve ordered. These are intended to make it easy to mount the lamb on a board, but I won’t be doing anything like that. It will be laying in the back seat of a car, partially in a bag.

Next, I notch the foam at the shoulder to give me room to bend the front leg. I want the lamb to be lying down instead of standing, so I have to reshape it slightly.

Including cutting it in half so I can rotate the hips. In a real animal, the spine would follow suit, but here we just use a hack saw and some good old fashioned bamboo skewers. I’ve also cut off one of the hind legs so I can reposition it.

Because this won’t need to move ever, I just taped it into place while the glue is setting. It’s like a cheap version of papier mache. I also used a rasp and a knife to take the hard edges off where I cut the lamb.

And here is the lamb assembled, with head, and ready to be covered with its skin.

For instance, I needed disappearing ink, but the magic store was out.  But, they were close to another store, where I was able to find the tree I needed for a different show.

The whole day was like that.  Tomorrow, though, the focus is on building the lamb and making a mountain of paper and pine needles.

It makes for an interesting bruise pattern, to say the least.

New Year’s Day, the actor whom we were holding it for, had someone pick it up.  Now, I have to say that it’s not his fault that it was here this long. We’d offered to ship the thing but it proved harder than we thought.  When I called him to say that we were giving up, he got his cousin to come over.

The process of getting the head out was like a Laurel and Hardy routine because the entry hall to our apartment turns the corner coming in. AND the head won’t fit on the elevator, so they had to walk it down five flights of stairs.

It is gone and our bedroom feels positively huge.

If you live near one of these burger joints and are willing to mail me some bags (I’ll reimburse for postage and buy you a burger or shake or whatever it is they serve there.), will you drop me a line?

Sometimes when dealing with props I can’t find the real thing or even a replica of it, so I just have to make it. In this case, we needed a Pictish helmet as one of the apparitions in MacBeth. The halloween stores had loads of helmets, but were strangely lacking in anything Pictish. Spartan on the other hand… those were everywhere. So I picked up the helmet in the photo for $9.00. It’s cheap vacuformed plastic and only vaguely the right shape.

The nice thing about this type of material is that it cuts easily. I began be trimming it into the shape that I needed, which was pretty easy to do with a pair of scissors

Next up, I used basic braid to create the decorative flourishes from my reference photo. The spiral patterns I did with a judicious use of hot glue as a design element.

Meanwhile, inside the helmet, I ran a hoop of armature wire to stiffen it and get rid of the woogedy-woogedy movement. Seriously, if you’re a warrior, you don’t want your helmet quivering.

To finish it off, I spray painted the whole thing bronze and then spattered it with a little black to give it a patina of age. Ah… I love it when a plan comes together.

This is my least favorite part of the process. It is the very definition of the word tedious. It’s so dull, I don’t even want to write a post about it, but here I go.

Because the dog is supposed to be a springer spaniel, it calls for two colors of fur, each of which comes in different lengths and textures. After looking for the right material, I finally settled on goat fur for the white and human hair wig for the black. The hair comes in packages like this and has a wave to it.

Each section looks like this when unpacked and is about three feet long.

You can see how I have to place each line of brown fur. I’ll admit that I started out sewing this on, which is the right way, and after awhile realized that a) it would take me forever and b) the dog wasn’t going to do enough movement on stage for me to worry about stability. So I glued the rest of it.

Here she is with most of the brown fur installed.

The white fur went faster, since it was basically goat hide and so I could do it in large pieces.

This is the dog with untrimmed fur.

Here’s where I’ve begun trimming and all that fur on the floor is what I’ve cut off. The biggest challenge here is to make it look like it’s naturally short, rather than trimmed. You know the difference, right? I mean, when you see a short haired dog you can tell when it’s naturally that way versus one that’s obviously been to the groomers. The way I do that is by using a straight razor instead of sheers. It lets me trim the fur with a little less regularity and gives it a more natural look.

And here she is with ears and mostly trimmed. After I took this, I went back and trimmed her legs to create the fetlocked appearance of a springer spaniel, but you get the idea.

Originally, I had planned on ordering a woodcock for the play and calling it good. I spent an amused day calling around asking for flying mount woodcocks before learning that they are migratory birds and illegal to sell. Great. So, that brought me to buying a grouse pelt and woodcock taxidermy parts. Now I ask you, what do you think arrived in this curiously flat envelope?

That would be the grouse pelt. The woodcock head, body and eyes came in a separate box. Who knew that birds come with some assembly required?

I thought it was quite curious that the feathers that show around the edges of the skin look very much like rabbit fur.

My grouse skin was a little small for my woodcock’s body. I used a razor to shave it down and then white glue to glue the pelt into place. T-pins held the skin in place while it dried.

Just in case you were wondering, this is not the way to do actual taxidermy. But it’s a fast way to make a prop.

Especially if you are making the ugliest prop in the world, which I evidently was. I did paint the head and beak after this but didn’t have the heart to record it for posterity.

Eventually, you find your way back to a wood door with “Rifle/Shotguns Permit Division.” Inside, are shiny new computers sitting on desks unchanged since 1950. There’s also a ledger book, which the clerk swears is new. I just wonder which year it belongs to.

You get finger-printed, have your picture made — despite having brought four passport photos as requested — and eventually get a shiny new permit.

Now to get the guns.

Weapons Specialists is a fantastic organization. The folks who run it are incredibly knowledgeable and willing to spend time with you to make certain that you are comfortable with the weapon. I loaded and test-fired three shotguns today with 1/4 charge ammunition.

I have learned some things that might be helpful in fiction.

• When putting down an animal, don’t put the muzzle directly on it or you risk creating a closed system which could blow the shell back up at you. That would be bad.
• Deer can’t see orange but they can see blue. Blue jeans stand out like neon.
• Birds can see orange.

Plus just the nuances of loading, dealing with the safety, and such. I got the guns safely dropped at the theater, introduced the cast to them and then ran away.

The spaniel’s name, by the way, is Lady.

I use quarter inch “crap” foam to put muscle on her skull. We call it crap foam to distinguish it from reticulated foam, which is strong and durable. Crap foam tears easily, oxidizes quickly, but is very lightweight and cheap. It’s also fairly stretchy. Lady doesn’t need a long life-span, and the stretchy property is a useful one. So is the dirt-cheap aspect.

The “muscle” I’m installing helps keep the jaw attached to the head. The layers of it provide more realistic motion than large sculpted pieces would.

Once the jaw is in place, I install the eyes. I only did it in this order because I was worried about dropping glue on the eyes. Later I had to put tape over them to do some painting, so that was a silly concern.

Remember those plywood legs? I used polyethylene planks to round them out to make “bones” and muscles. It’s the same stuff as I used on her spine.

And here’s what she looks like trimmed and muscled.

I used spandex to make a sort of pajama suit of skin for her.

With the skin in place, I paint it dark brown in all the places she’ll get brown fur. You’ll notice that the skin is not covering her whole body, and is mostly in the areas where the brown fur goes. That’s because in order to get the right color and texture for the fur, I had to go with human hair extensions. I need the skin in order to attach that. Her white fur will be a goat hide, and I’ll be able to use the natural leather backing.

What you are looking at here is the bottom of the dog’s skull, minus the lower jaw. I’ve run a steel cable in through the hole where the spinal cord goes. Convienently, there are holes from the brain case down into the upper palette which I threaded the cable through and the looped it back to attach it to itself. This will hold the whole thing securely together but also allow flexible movement.

Since this really just has to flop in the way a real dog would, I don’t have to worry too much about getting the balance right for manipulation. I’m doing ultra simple construction for the legs. These are just flat pieces of airplane ply held together by cotter pins. I’ll put stops on them to keep them from hyper-extending and also use the foam itself as a sort of muscle to control their direction of movement.

At the hip, I have a rudimentary pelvis and have attached the legs to the hips with tieline.  They hang nicely but I totally forgot to take a photo.

Part of why I’m being bad with photos is because I’ve already built one wounded dog, so I’m figuring this isn’t covering any new ground for you.  On the other hand, I am building the legs differently this time.  PLUS the covering of this dog will be such a pain that I will document it in full.

I haven’t had to acquire “long-arms” before and have discovered that they are completely different than dealing with handguns. For one thing, it’s not possible to convert them to fire only blanks, So tomorrow, I’m going to troop down to the courthouse to apply for a long-arms permit and then, I’m going to pick up two rifles. In NYC.

I’ll report in full. Presuming I don’t wind up in jail.

It’s in our hall now but we had to walk it up the stairs. Comically, we managed to coax it into the elevator but the slight difference in door geometry on our floor sent us cursing back down to the lobby.

Even on the 50 foot walk from the curb to our building, two people (New Yorkers no less) stopped to gawk, chat, and one took a photo.

I thought you might like the attached images for your blog.

This is one that comes up a lot and, strangely, I don’t think I’ve posted on it, so I’ll give the long answer.

I was one of those kids who wanted to do everything. My parents indulged me and so I took violin, art, theater classes, writing workshops and then, in high school, discovered puppetry. A friend of mine went to a church that had a puppet ministry program, which was the coolest thing ever. I started going to the church so I could be involved — maybe not the best reason to join a church. Anyway, I got very lucky because the leaders of the puppetry program worked very hard on teaching us good skills. A lot of puppet ministry programs have truly dreadful puppetry.

I loved the puppetry. When our high school did Little Shop of Horrors, I was the plant.

I did puppetry as a hobby until I went to college. I majored in art education with a minor in theater, which was the closest I could come to combining everything that I loved to do. ((Later I learned about colleges, like the University of Connecticut, that had puppetry programs.)) My sophomore year, the college did Little Shop and I was the plant again.

Then a professional puppeteer came to see the show. Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that someone would actually get paid to do puppetry. I mean, sure, I’d seen Sesame Street, but that was on PBS and everyone knew that PBS was run by volunteers, right? Yeah… But this puppeteer, Dee Braxton, owned a house, only worked a couple of days a week and most importantly, was willing to train me. By the end of the first summer, she was handing me the gigs she couldn’t take. People were giving me money. To do puppets. I was making more money doing that than my part-time job.

Later, I realized that we lived in an area of the country with a very low cost of living and that we were the only puppeteers in a three county radius. It helps.

From there I went to the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, GA for an internship. This shaped me as a puppeteer more than anything else. George Latshaw (like unto a god, in puppetry) was directing, and the cast was a dream team of puppeteers, Jon Ludwig, Jane Catherine Shaw, Bobby Box, and Peter Hart. Pete was in charge of the internship program and my mentor. If I tried to say enough good things about that program, I would bore you, so suffice to say that I can trace everything back to there.

After the internship, I just kept working. I’ve been at it for nineteen years now and, with the exception of a two-year break due to a wrist injury, have made my living as a puppeteer.

Until I came to NYC.

Now the irony here is that, before Iceland, I’d had several years where I worked three to five months out of the year here, as a puppeteer. I always felt as if I would work constantly if I lived here. And behold, that’s true. The odd thing is that almost all the work has been in the props department.

That’s something I stumbled into and I’m not quite sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, I enjoy it and it’s honest work. On the other hand, it’s not why we came to NYC and is taking up so much time that I haven’t had a chance to really pursue puppetry and it’s cutting into my writing time.

Rob and I are talking about how to balance that, going forward. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

When you demand a prop, a strange and difficult to acquire prop, which requires some hours of time to get for you, please think carefully when presented with the object before you announce that you prefer what you’ve been using in rehearsal.

Many thanks for your time and attention.

A prop master who is checking on the return policy.

Consider this gem.

Thoughts of a Sliver

The Vine Yearns for a tea table.
I take it.
Were done properly on a rule.
Oh.
What was your name when he was your letters from there?
Why him?
Forgotten Person, I said you ask
The last two there.
And that, yes.
My Pilot in the Light
Perhaps just a great deal.
The last two there.
You are a tea table.

Go on. Read it aloud in a “meaningful” voice and tell me that it wouldn’t fit in at a poetry slam.

I think, if I’m doing accounting for the timezone right, it took me thirteen hours to get home today.

And then! I made props and went to the theater to watch the dress rehearsal. Happy? Bed now. Happy!!!

After fiddling with it, we got rid of all the complicated bits and switched to the bluefoam donut I made last night and this morning. The new system works like a champ. Whew. No more fail! I tried taking photos, but the line is too thin to show up on my camera.

Basically, we run a piece of 15 lb braided dacron ((black fishing line that I use for marionettes)) offstage, using screw eyes and tubing to control where it runs. The donut sits on a short ramp on the upstage side of the tv, out of the line of sight of the audience. While they are looking at other business onstage, a stagehand pulls the string and the donut slides up the ramp and into place.

The string on its bottom is held in place by a piece of clear tape. When the actor picks up the donut, the tape, caught by a screw eye, releases. Voila. Magic donut.

Now that you know how we do that, I’ll have to kill you.

I actually said the sentence, “As soon as I buy the moose head, I have to go pick up some KY jelly.”

What’s the strangest combination of things you’ve ever bought?

Alas, the Glock throws the spent casings in a twenty-foot arc, which lands them squarely in the audience. I’m taking it back in the morning for a revolver.

As part of the rental package, they give a tutorial on handling the gun. Included in the tutorial are instructions for what to do if stopped by a police officer while carrying the gun to the theater.

If stopped:
Keep your hands clear and visible. State calmly, “I have a blank-firing gun in my bag. I will let you open it. The receipt is in the case along with quarter-charge ammo. The gun is not loaded.” And then, don’t move until given the okay.

I’m hoping I don’t have to use those instructions.

“My god!”

“What is it?”

“Are they real?”

“May I touch your dead animal heads?”

I’m doing props for Bully Pulpit, a show about Teddy Roosevelt, who was a big hunter. The whole thing is set in the North Room at Sagamore Hill which was decorated with… yes, taxidermy. I found these heads on Craig’s List and they were only ten blocks from my house. Clearly, I was not going to pass up a chance to interact with my fellow New Yorkers.

One poor woman, who must have been a serious vegan, had a look of absolute horror on her face while her son was totally fascinated. Her husband stopped with their daughter so I could explain about taxidermy and theater. She stood behind them looking like she wanted to throw up.

I’ll bet they have a very interesting conversation when they get home.

Everyone else I passed seemed either completely indifferent or amused.

In the evening, Katherine and I headed down to the Peter and the Wolf rehearsal. She alternated between reading and watching rehearsal while I painted puppets. Did I mention that I’d done the design for the animal characters? No… anyway, my puppet isn’t here from China yet, so I’ll be mostly observing till it gets here on Wednesday.

After rehearsal, Katherine and I went for Japanese food. At the moment, I’m creating some hand props for Steve and Idi before heading to bed.

In all seriousness, sometimes in theater we need a piece of furniture to look as if it was older. The process of taking a new thing and making it look old is called “distressing.” In the show that I did props on, the original show table broke and had to be replaced. Someone else picked up the new one, but I had to run over to the theater to distress the table.

I use a steel wool to dull the finish, a little paint for staining and honking big rasp to create dings and scratches. By honking big, I mean the about eighteen inches long and an inch wide.

On the way home, I’ve got all the tools in my bag and the rasp handle was poking out. It rested at my hip at almost the angle of a sword’s hilt. At one point, I passed this guy who tried to get me to stop and talk to him. Never works, but this time I got a story flash.

See, I always want to write stories with people in theater, but really need the fact that they are in theater to have an intrinsic role in the story. So, showing a props master at work on a show and the bag of tricks used and then getting to reuse those tools in very different ways later would be a lot of fun.

I mean, can’t you just imagine drawing the rasp like a short sword? And from the time or two that I’ve accidentally caught myself with one, those suckers hurt.

In the production of Rainbow Kiss, a Battenberg Cake figures prominently however it’s never eaten. Now, the battenberg is very specific in look, with a checkerboard of pink and white visible in every slice. While it’s very common in the UK, it’s something of a specialty item here, so I asked the director if it would be all right to have a fake one rather than a perishable one. Thank heavens he’s quite reasonable and saw the sense in that.

Appropriately, the Battenberg is a sponge cake so. I got two shop sponges and cut them into the pieces for the checkerboard. I dyed two of them pink, using food coloring, and left two the color of the sponge.

Real Battenberg is held together with apricot jam. I used a mix of vinyl wallpaper paste and acrylic paint to get that gelatinous orange quality.

As the sponges absorbed moisture from the paste, they swelled. To keep them from separating, I used a good old fashioned c-clamp. Later, when I needed to apply equal pressure over the whole thing, I wrapped the cake in masking tape, which I left in place for the next phase.

Icing the cake. Mm… looks yummy, right? If that were real, it’d be covered in marzipan. As it is, it’s a lovely confection of gloss gel medium, modeling paste and a touch of raw sienna for that almond tint. The final product took forever to dry, even with a fan on it.

See, the exterior of the icing dried quickly, but it sealed the surface, so the rest of the moisture wicked inside the sponge and could only evaporate out the ends. When it finally set, I used an electric carving knife to cut slices.

Apparently I made a monster Battenberg. The real ones are about half the size of mine. At least, the commercially available ones are. One of the actresses reassured me that homemade or bakery ones are big like mine. Whew. It’s hard to tell from online photos how large they are, you know? I was estimating based on the recipes and how thick American cakes are. I should have known better, since we tend to supersize things.

It’s a Battenberg cake, as specified in the script.

Thanks! Googlefu is failing.

Edited to add: A hearty thank you to Sean, who found the info for me.

BUT. I’m in tech week for two different shows for the next week. I will be largely offline during this.

While I’m working, would you take a moment to share your favorite curses? It’ll come in handy. Remember that couch? Yeah… I’ve got stories to tell about it, once I get past this week.

The second thing you should know is that after you pick up the axe, you will have no problems finding a seat on the subway.

The third thing is that random passerbys will engage you in conversations like the following.

“Whoa. You mean business,” the man says as he comes out the door and sees you.

“Yeah, well,” you said, not really wanting to explain the show for which the axe is a prop. “There’s not much call for them in the city, I’ll admit.”

“He must have really pissed you off.”

You smile. “It’s so true. There’s really not a reason to have an axe in the city unless you’re planning to off someone.”

If you say that, the passerby will suddenly find something else very interesting on the other side of the street.

All of which makes me wonder why I could buy an axe in a city with no need for cutting firewood.