Doing the Impossible
Perhaps, therefore, ideal stage managers need not only be calm and meticulous professionals who know their craft, but also masochists who feel pride in rising above impossible odds.— Sir Peter Hall, director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre of Great Britain
The words on the back of the store-room door in Bristol Grammar School's Mackay Theatre, where I learnt how little is actually impossible, if you're willing to push people to their limits. To the best of my knowledge, that sign is still there to this very day — along with one of my larger tool boxes — looking down on the people I left behind to run that theatre.
I left for an entirely different kind of theatre — a better staffed, more skilled, and noticeably more professional one — where the ability to build just about anything out of polystyrene and card was less useful. But, the entire process was quite fun along the way. There were some amusing episodes back in that old theatre: I once ran up a flight of stairs into a lighting bar...every night for the run of a show (in my defence, I had to run up that staircase a half a dozen or so times a day, and only during one particular scene change would a lighting bar be there).
However, I digress — if not quite in the way I had anticipated I would1. The extremely difficult, or the temporally impossible2 are things that come up in every day life. Time is always against humans (even if only in the longer ones), and how we face it is a major issue.
Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done and why. Then go do it.— Lazarus Long3
It's well established that large pieces of work can be done in small amounts of time — ask any student about their essay work4 — and the wonderfully complex can be completed. The old adage of “done fast, done cheap, done well — pick two” comes to mind, along the thought that there is always one that a person can give up, namely done cheap.
This is, however, the thoughts of someone writing a blog post at around six in the morning. Just because there's the whole sleep thing that I should do at some point, it's not going to stop me from getting a blog post out.