F/X - The Early Year

So I left Central Florida Display, and we went to Seattle on my birthday 1996. Carmen and I were looking at Seattle as a possible next destination for our adventure together. It was rainy and snowy and cold, oh my, but we liked the city. The cost of living is way higher than Orlando and the wages not so much. Real estate prices were ridiculous compared to Orlando. But the real deciding factor was that we felt so very far away from all of our family and friends. Back from our vacation we were in a tailspin over where to go next. But on January 23rd I was scheduled to begin work at F/X Scenery and Display, with Eddie Channell as my shop boss once again.

The shop was located on a railroad spur nestled back in an industrial park off of Sand Lake Road. I knew where it was because Al Caputo had had some peripheral dealings with Mack over the years. In fact, early in my career at F/X, Al traded his semi trailer and everything in it for us to do a show for a client of his. Al was out of show business by then, but still willing to take somebody's money to get one together. He also had no good place to keep his trailer load of crap.

One of the first things I worked on during those early months was a new (and short-lived) game show called "Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego." We built a huge time machine set, a "Chief" screen wall for Lynn Thigpen, and six portals for the last part of the game. I built all of the rolling platforms to which the portals were attached, and the "Stonehenge" portal. Way cool. I still haven't encountered anyone who ever saw it on TV - not even me.

During the spring we finally decided to move north, just not so far. We put our St. Cloud house on the market, freshly painted inside and out, and began looking for a house in Orlando. After looking at twenty five or thirty houses, we found one we liked in the county, about six blocks south of the city limits. It was close enough to F/X that I could go home for lunch if I wanted. I did, twice. I believe it was for this reason that Mack began looking for a place to locate F/X, far far away from his house, which was ten blocks from our new house.

Everett Moran came to work for us that summer of 1996. He was from Honduras, grew up on the streets, never went to school, had very limited English, and little by little we figured out that he didn't know how to count. He obviously had learned over the years to get along without being able to count, and having never encountered such a thing before, it was hard for us to spot. We would tell him to cut twenty five pieces of one by, and he'd commence-a-whacking. We'd come back in a bit and ask how many he'd done. "Plenny!" he told us. Sometimes it would be eighteen, sometimes thirty seven, never the right number. I finally figured it out one day when Everett and I were setting up pipe and drape at the Dolphin Hotel. We needed seventeen uprights, so we were going around the room attaching pipes to bases and standing them up. After a while I paused to count. "How many we got?" asked Everett. "Sixteen." "An' how many we need?" "Seventeen." "So how many more?" W-h-a-a-a-a-t ? !

During the fall we did the first of many many many television news sets I worked on. We did five different sets for Court TV. The one that stands out in my mind is the one that had "V" groves on every panel, three eighths of an inch wide, routed into the laminate. The designer from New York measured every groove, and either they were three eighths or they were done over. I think there were twenty-some panels. The grooves were rectangles set three inches (not three and a sixteenth) in from the edges of the panels, with diagonals corner to corner. Suffice it to say that this was an immense pain in the ass times twenty-some. When the set was used on Court TV, I watched it for probably six hours, and during that time caught a fleeting glimpse of one corner of one panel maybe four times.

In November we were getting a load ready for a big corporate event, with decks and flats and pipe and drape and rear projection screens and lecterns and the whole magilla. Somewhere along the line, Mack came out and asked if any of us had experience running follow spot. Keith and I raised our hands. "This client asked for two follow spot operators on the last night of the convention, but there's a catch." Uh oh, what's this? "The entertainment is John Denver." Luckily, among the dozens of people working for F/X, Keith and I were the only ones who liked John Denver. In fact, I was putting together a church service for the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and I wanted to sing "Back Home Again," but I didn't have the song on any of my CDs. I was pretty sure I remembered the verses correctly, but I wasn't dead sure until the last night of the convention, hosing JD with photons from the twenty foot high stage left spot tower, listening to the author. He asked us to sing along on the choruses, and my dulcet tones filled the hall from the top of that tower. I packed John's guitars after the show. His manager asked if I'd like to play one, so I did for a minute. Then he gave me a pick with John's name on it. Wow. I was especially glad I'd had that experience when John died about a year later.

In December I began a year-long saga with AAA that is written up already in "The Gospel Of Rand McNally" in a post called "Triple A Times Seven" And then there was the Christmas party. We were invited to bring a guest. Everett showed up with his wife, his three kids and his next door neighbors. Plenny of guests.

The early part of 1997, between shows, we were packing to move. Mack was buying an old dilapidated abandoned corugated steel building in Ocoee. Who do you think he put in charge of keeping track of how many of what was packed into which trailer? Of course it was Everett Moran!