Lydia’s Blog

A couple of weeks ago, as I was meandering toward the opera’s cafeteria, I noticed a couple of cool colleagues from the props department in a large storage room that’s usually bolted shut. The room was well on its way to claiming empty status. The two guys, Ralf and Martin appeared to be clearing it out.

Why not? I thought.

“Hey guys, what are you up to?” I chirped. Ralf, the head of the props department (who sounds uncannily female on the phone, to the extreme embarassment of many a colleague, me included) informed me that they were emptying out the in-house props storage, to make room for an additional costume vault.

“Seriously? You mean you’re throwing everything out?” My interior-decor bone suddenly sprang to full-blooded erection. “Everything?”

The best thing about being tight with the folks in costumes, props, tech, and all other varieties of backstage concentrations (besides the fact that these people tend to be much more generally palatable than most other colleagues), is the little prezzies that one can scavenge with some charm and a bit of luck.

This is especially true for someone like me, whose design sense tends toward the “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” end of the spectrum.

I told Ralf not to move another object until I had a chance to come back with some form of transport.

And so I called Daniel. My boyfriend Daniel has, among other valuable qualities, a car…and a spartan preference for minimalism. Until now, he’s been remarkably patient to live within the tangle of Catholic kitsch, mannequin bits, French postcards and antique medical diagrams that constitutes my apartment in Stuttgart.

“Can you please bring your car around later this afternoon? The props department are clearing out their storage rooms and I NEED to get on it.”

There was only silence at the end of the line. “But Lydia, you’ve already got SO much…”

I might have blacked out from disappointed annoyance at that moment…because the next thing I remember is whimpering like a dog into the reciever while he groaned “JESUS. Ugh. Fine, just cut that out. I’ll see you at five.”

Me, Martin and a stone-faced Daniel arrived in props storage later on with a small garbage bag. We would leave about an hour later with a shipping crate. Two busts, one plaster and one bronze, three sets of mounted stag horns, four enormous medical diagrams (one of a horse) and several other delicious effects. At Daniel’s calm, pained insistence, I forewent the toy tanks and oversized greek masks…as well as a waist-high bust of Apollo.

“Nugget, are you okay?” I asked.

“Stuff.” He said dully, fearfully eyeballing the remaining shelves which I’d not yet attacked.

Later, after he’d driven off with my swag, I got to thinking about why I’ve become so militant about such artefacts, which range from the valuable and rare to the cheap and absurd.

I think it’s this: I have no real home. The apartments I live in are rented furnished, for short periods of time, and I move with a station wagon full of boxes, rather than a truck full of sofas, tables and wardrobes. Every second I’m alive, I’m reminded of the temporary nature of my practical life. These bits and pieces amount to the sum of my experiences for the last several years, and their stories are important to me…and are also in many ways much more interesting than the reality I’m living at the moment.

There’s the eight French postcards (basically softcore porn from about 1910) I bought in Amalfi, the two latex headpieces from the tours of “Plays for the Poor Theatre” in Dublin, New York and Berlin. The cigarette poster from Hong Kong. The crude painting on a scrap bit of 2 x 4 I bought from a homeless guy near the Empire State Building. The blinking “God Bless our Home” Jesus and Mary given to me by a dear friend in London, the cheap mini-icons I bought in Vatican City. The head of a 1950’s child mannequin at Karstadt. The CAT scan images from my bike accident in Berlin five years ago. The “The Enemy is Syphilis” lunch box…

Anyway, my props storage swag sat in Daniel’s car until just yesterday, when we had to clear it out in preparation for a visit from his grandmother, mother and her boyfriend.

While he went to gather his family from the train station, I went to work on the plaster bust. I slapped some hot red lipstick on him and topped him off with a lovely pink wig. Then, I placed him high atop a rented bookshelf, next to the red foam head which supports the antique bonnet I ganked from an indie film-set in Berlin a while back.

He’s absolutely delicious. I don’t know what I’d do without him.

Or the rest of it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.