Watch Me Try.

If someone tells you that you're not good at something, you don't necessarily have to believe them.

In high school, I helped build and paint all the sets for every single show I was in.  I got on the scene shop crew in college and worked there for a year and a half.  I might have stayed in the entire four years, until they hired a TD I couldn't stand and fled to the box office, a move that has kept me employable ever since.

I married a TD.  I have volunteered in three of the five shops he's worked for, because I have experience and I like the work.  But he's told me, I'm not fast enough, I'm not strong enough, I don't know enough to be helpful.  And I think, "well, he's worked summer stock and road crews, he knows.  I guess I'm not."

I'm stage managing a college choir Christmas concert.  The show has a well-meaning but inefficient college student crew that was this year supplemented by a hand-picked set of former large road house student crew who went through the same road house experience the TD I married has, but that I don't.  We met them at 8am today- one I know, the brother of a friend, but the rest were all strangers.  One was a former member of the college's crew, a guy who was called amazing and talented and one of the best.  The difference between him and the large road house crew was painfully obvious.

We put in an 8 hour day loading in and doing changeover for the performance tomorrow, and early on in the day, they were talking about hourly supervisor pay at the road house- more money than I make hourly in one of my jobs with the most hours.

"Really?  I should move up there and apply."
"Why don't you contact the union here in town and get on their overhire crew?"
"I could do that?"
"Sure, you do this all the time, right?"
"No?"
"Seriously?  Then you should give them a call and get on crew and get paid twice that.  They always need people; they call people from Cedar Rapids half the time."

By the end of today, I was the one the crew was coming to and the tech engineer was deferring to me over the production manager for a second opinion.  The tech engineer is a guy who worked with the guy I married, was his supervisor for a few years.  He knows his stuff and has no reason to ask my opinion about anything, and, up to today, hadn't.  I did something to prove my opinion was worth asking.

I play it well, though.  I costume appropriately, the jeans with the paint on the knees, my hiking boots that resemble steel toed shoes, a tech company t-shirt.  Being the girl in the room in ETC or Northern Sound gear means something in theatre, and I only have to do enough work to finish the illusion that I know a lot more than I really do.

Maybe it's not an illusion.