work

so if you hadn't noticed, i try to talk minamally about my job. i do that because after awhile it's boring to hear about what i do for a living, but now is the time. we have a group of 12 people from beijing who have been traveling and working with us in china. they are our "locals". they all know the show, and speak chinese, and very little, to no english. so here we are in beijing, and we just got done with our load-in. load-in typicallly takes 2 days. one of my jobs is to get the pit ready for our band guy to come in and set up. the conductors podium needs to be a certain height for our tiny conductor to be able to see the stage. he's short. anyway, i was standing on his platform trying to figure out what we needed to do to make it taller. my beijing guy was watching me. without any words, we had an entire conversation of what needed to happen. he knew that the platform had to be higher. so i found a piano stool and put it on the existing platform and stood on it, which he watched me do. then without any measuring, off he went and within an hour had built me a platform for the conductor that was the perfect size. it was kind-of amazing. he and i don't even use an interpreter anymore. it's a bother to both of us. and of course he is one of the 2 guys we are loosing at the end of beijing. figures.
so that's my work talk, boring i know, but a little insight to what i do.

i am off to either the forbidden city, or tian'anmen square this afternoon. woo-hoo, history.

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