When The Pupil Is Ready...

In 1995, working at Presentations South, Inc., the job seemed to be: build a box, laminate it - build another box, laminate it etc. In the footsteps of Og, I proved myself to be really not very good at laminating - to the point where things I'd done went on display in the break room for the amusement of the rest of the guys. Jim Matthews kept telling me to ask the other guys for help and advice, which I did, but it didn't seem to help.

At Central Florida Display I did some laminating, but the sucky quality of my work kind of blended in with the general suckiness of Central Florida Display. At F/X there was a laminating department that got upset if the rest of us took work away from them. This suited me fine. For the next nine years, the fact that I couldn't laminate seemed to matter not at all.

At Mystic, whenever they didn't know what to do with someone, they stuck him in the laminating department. Early in my Mystical career I was thrown kicking and screaming into laminating. Pete was on vacation, so Paul was in charge of the department. I thought about putting on a brave face and just diving in. That sounded like a really bad idea. So I went up to Paul and said, "I'm here to help you with the laminating. The problem is, I've never been any good at it. Would you be willing to teach me?" And he did. He took me under his wing and showed me, step by step, from the most basic preparations through the gluing, the sticking, the rubbing down and the filing. By the end of the first week, my skills had progressed to the point where I could actually fly solo and do an acceptable job at a fairly complex project. This was a very good thing, because the laminating department only did about half of the laminating in the building. The cabinet guys pretty much all did their own, because they all did it so much better than Pete, just ask them. When the scenery division had laminating to do, there was usually a lot of it, and Pete's guys couldn't handle it all and get it done on time. I actually became one of the better laminators in the scenery section. All thanks to Paul, my sensei.