The Stones, Man

I had decided that I had had enough of show business. I wanted to head in a new direction. What better new direction than to work in the retail displays industry where I started in March of 1972? Weeks before I left Presentations South I answered an ad for a "shop foreman" at Central Florida Display and Exhibits, Inc. I won't dwell on the details of this non-show-biz gig, but I will illustrate why I called it "The Stones, Man"

March of 1995 saw me trying to finish up the Easter Village for a mall near Houston, Texas. My crew were not carpenters, there were no coherant plans for what to build, and the table saw blade stopped when I tried to cut corrugated cardboard with it. And my boss, Tony, was totally oblivious. I asked about a new table saw or maybe a compressor, and he told me that if he were going to spend hundreds of dollars to improve his business, he would buy a new suit. The only power tool he knew how to use was a hot glue gun, and he burned himself every time he used that. I was on salary, so the long days and nights I spent drawing plans, wrestling with the tools, building pieces and fixing what others built counted for nothing as far as pay or future time off. Nothing. My favorite story about that Easter project was the day we were all out in the parking lot doing the fancy colorful paint job on everything. The landlord of the warehouse complex was very picky about his parking lot, so Tony bought a roll of plastic, we set everything on it, and then Tony placed our dozens of cans of brightly colored paint all around the edges to hold the plastic down . Good plan - until a big wind came racing through the lot and lifted the sheet of plastic, dumping ALL the cans of paint onto the parking lot. Oops.

Things didn't get any better during the ensuing ten months of employment. It came to pass that as "shop Foreman" it was my job to do drawings for approval and for non-carpenters to build from; to call lunber yards etc. for the best prices on all materials, order materials, go pick up materials in my little Corolla, build, paint and deliver everything we did. Meanwhile, we couldn't keep a graphics person, so I learned to operate the computer driven vinyl graphics cutting system, weed the vinyl and install it. By the end of October I was getting pretty good at juggling all of these hats.

Then we got the go-ahead for a big Christmas Village for a mall outside of Gainesville, Florida. Suddenly the lack of carpenters other than me was cutting into my other jobs big time. I told Tony that I needed at least one person who could build something without me standing over them showing them, cut by cut, staple by screw how to build it. He said he'd put an ad in the Sunday paper. Sunday morning I looked in the paper, all over the help wanted section. No ad for a carpenter for Central Florida Display. Hmmmm. Monday I went to him and almost quit on the spot. "I put the ad in, " he told me. He showed me his ad :"Floral arrangers wanted for busy retail display company. Will assemble, arrange and install seasonal decor in malls and stores during November and December. Also needed: carpenter." Needless to say, no carpenters looking for jobs saw that. Tony did hire a young man who, when asked, said "Sure, I'm a carpenter!" I gave him a simple box to build and he couldn't do it. Tony said, "You didn't give him any direction!" "If you mean I didn't stand over him telling him how to build a box, cut by cut, staple by screw, yes you're right. But if that's what I have to do, then there's a lot of other things I have to do that aren't going to get done - which is why I wanted you to hire a carpenter in the first place, remember?"

Once I had finished building the village, the installations began at malls and stores all over Central Florida. Weeks were averaging eighty hours and more. My crew members were showing up drunk, raiding food courts during the nights, installing things crooked or unsafely or in the wrong places, try though I might to keep my eyes on twenty unmotivated people at once.

The good thing about it was that on my way home during the morning hours I could swing by F/X Scenery And Display and see if Eddie was around. When he was I would describe my night to him and reminded him of our pact: bring me aboard when you can! He did. After my last Christmas Crap removal detail in January, we took a week's vacation to Seattle, then I started my nine and a quarter years at F/X.

About three months into the F/X job I was stricken with kidney stones. I wondered at the time whether working for Tony had had anything to do with it. Then, early in the following year, the poor sucker who had replaced me at CFD&E came to work at F/X. Within a couple of months he too was stricken with - the stones, man. Like wow.