A Little Vacation, Mr. Manley?

This is one of those out-of-sequence stories that occur to me out of the blue. As a matter of fact, I was watching America's Funniest Home Videos the other night when they had a series of "Twenty Five Spurts In Fifteen Seconds," or something similar, showing clips of people being squirted in the face or elsewhere. I was suddenly reminded of the time in (I believe) 1992 when Image International had a gig at The Ritz Carlton Hotel on Amelia Island up near the Georgia line. It was a six-day gig from Friday to Wednesday. I was invited to the meeting, because Eddie and I were the shop at the time, and he was being sent out on some other job. This gig began with an outdoor symphony concert, with a 24' X 32' stage to build, and then an arcade to assemble brick walls for. (Ray sold forty brick panels. Al gave him twenty.) Then we had three days off, unpaid, before the big outdoor Games Night and strike on Wednesday night. The rules were read to us about our time at the Ritz - no pool use, no lounging in common areas, dress and act professional at all times while on hotel property - so I said, "If I'm not being paid, I'm going home!" Of course, this raised a ruckus. Kevin Rose said, "Don't you want a little vacation?" I told him I didn't call it a vacation if I'm stuck in a room with two other guys and can't enjoy myself in any way. Well, they weren't driving me home or flying me home, and I wasn't to ride my motorcycle there (heaven forbid!) So I asked for a round trip bus ticket from Jacksonville. That they went for, because nobody else in the crew could do the stage on Friday, or the Velcro wall on Wednesday.

For this party I built one of my most elaborate games, a slanting eight foot tall by four foot wide polygon, 6 inches thick, with holes of various sizes and placements for different point values. The whiffle softballs were tossed at the holes for points, and the internal structure channeled each ball from the hole to the slot at the bottom numbered with the corresponding points. It was very popular.

So on Friday, bright and early, we all piled into various cars and trucks and lit out for Amelia Island. After depositing our luggage in our rooms, booked in the name of crew boss David Manley, we set out for the truck to unload what we needed for the first day, the staging. It was brought out to the edge of the practice putting green, where I was instructed to set it up. I started out using big chunks of lumber to shim up the low places and make it level. But the client came along and told me he wanted the stage to kind of roll with the landscape. So I pulled out most of the shims and screwed together the frames as best I could with the roll of the landscape. The plywood decking was a little challenging to make pretty. I had barely begun plywood when the tent company came and asked for a hole to be cut in the center sheet of plywood for the center tent pole. This I did, then finished the plywood while the tent went up around me.
Saturday morning I awoke to find myself alone. I looked out the sliding glass doors to the green, where David Manley and his crew were almost finished painting the entire stage black. I turned away, but suddenly there was screaming from the green area. I turned back to see the guys scurrying away because the sprinkler system had come on. There were three or four Rainbird sprinklers shooting streams of water at the freshly painted stage. By the time they got the hotel to shut the sprinklers off, the stage was badly in need of another coat of paint.

We then began to load in and set up the brick panels for the arcade. This was in another tent, with a grass floor. We had it pretty much together when the games company arrived with the pinball machines, basketball game, air hockey etc. We were stringing extension cords all over the tent, and had just about finished when the Florida afternoon thunderstorm hit. Within minutes we were standing in two inches of water in the middle of dozens of electrical cords strewn around the floor. Time to go.

I got a ride to the Jacksonville bus station and was home before midnight. The return trip began late Monday night. I would arrive in Jax early early Tuesday morning. I had my suitcase loaded with one change of clothes and my tools. It was pretty heavy. I knew before I got there that what I wanted to do was to walk from downtown Jacksonville to the Island, twenty some miles. I damn near made it, too. At the bridge to the island was a little convenience store/bait shop. I used their phone to call Ray Ramsey. He came and got me. As I exited Ray's car, a hotel employee came and grabbed my suitcase. "I'll get that, Mr. Manley!" I told him a) I was going outside to the green with that suitcase and b) I had no tip money. "It's my pleasure, Mr. Manley!" I imagined that, after years of being taken for granted by the usual rich people, it was something of a treat for these employees to go the extra mile for us working stiffs, tip or no (and the client was paying them a big gratuity for all of the Mr. Manleys on the crew.)

So I did some prep work, stapling "loop" fabric on the plywood for the Velcro wall Tuesday night, and Wednesday morning began assembling three eight foot by twelve foot frames into a slanted twelve foot tall by twenty four wide climbing wall, with enough 2X4s to hold it together and stand it up. This took the major part of the day. Then I stood up my new ball toss game and helped with the rest of the party decor until nightfall, when a guy took my suitcase to my room and said "My pleasure, Mr. Manley!" I sat in the comfy chair and watched the party out the glass doors, dozing in and out until the real Mr. Manley called us out for strike. We had everything disassembled and in the truck before you could say "My pleasure, Mr. Manley!"