Other Union Slang: a seat warmer

seat warmer (noun): a sub who holds the place for an 802 musician who goes off to play another gig. Similar to a stiff, but seat warmers can't be used indefinitely. Eventually, an absent musician has to give up there chair in the pit.

Term of the Day: Intel

Intel (noun): Intelligence whether a show is going to run or not. "Do you have any intel on whether we are going to survive January and February?"

Term of the Moment: Captain Panic

Captain Panic--a good nickname for a stagehand or stage manager who panics when there is disaster and mayhem backstage...when units are crashing into each other and you need a cool head, this is time when he or she decides to freak out. See also: Chicken Little

Term of the Day: get it on the load out

get it on the load out--when a prop, a flashlight or an important piece of hardware rolls under the show deck, it is often impossible to retrieve. Someone will say, "We'll get it on the loadout,"  meaning the item will be retrieved then, or possibly never. Sometimes said compassionately to the person who lost the item, sometimes not.

Term of the Day: hard-soft rule

Hard-soft rule: a rule on the books by theater owners that is mostly ignored and only enforced when advantageous or useful to them.

Term of the Minute: Fake nice guy

fake nice guy: often a TV segment producer, a roadman or a tech, who will be chummy until they freak out or throw you under the bus. Some people will even rent a bus to throw you under.

Obscure term of the day: Rowing the boat

rowing the boat (verb): an old vaudeville bit, where a performer will pull himself across the stage with a cane while on one knee while singing. The vigorous strokes with the cane look like the man is rowing a boat.

Term of the moment: cruise-ship actor

cruise-ship actor (noun): cruise ships are famous for their 90-minute versions of  Broadway shows, bastardized and dumbed down for passengers satiated by prime rib. It is a pejorative term, a way of dismissing someone's experience..

Term of shame: my ball drop

my ball drop--fessing up to missing a cue. "That was my ball drop," said the honest stagehand.

Term of the moment: Stage dog

stage dog (n.)--an actor who delights on being on stage, NOT most Hollywood actors. "Geoffrey Rush is an old stage dog," said his director on "Exit the King."

Term of the Day: shoe requirement

shoe requirement (n.)--when a tech or a producer tries to foist an incompetent or unskilled stagehand on a contract man. "Several prominent contract prop men turned down a major musical because of the shoe requirement, which meant hiring the tech's son."

Term of the Moment: a rip-away

Term of the Moment: a rip-away: a costume that is rigged with Velcro or snaps to be pulled off quickly. "In the ill-fated 'Dracula' on Broadway, the actress Kelli O'Hara wore a rip-away nightgown that was pulled off through a hole in the deck by a carpenter."

Term of the Day: throw a fish back every once in a while"

"throw a fish back every once in a while"--when heads or men with full-time work at long-running shows suck up all the load-in work on Broadway, this is the response. A head friend of mine said "Throw a fish back once in a while," meaning don't take offered work and let other stagehands get a slice of the pie.

Term of the Day: Ham and Egging It

ham and egging it--an improvised, fast and not very good solution to a problem, rigging something up with the wrong materials. "We are ham and egging it. We should slow down and come up with a permanent solution." Also: "a ham-and-egg solution."

Term of the Moment: Death from Above

Death from Above: Borrowed from a slogan that I believe was coined during the Vietnam-era helicopter assaults, I heard a head carpenter whisper this last night as he watched when several stagehands ran out onstage when a hanger was flying out.

Term of the Day: stagehand rumor

stagehand rumor: (noun) a story or piece of gossip making the rounds in the Broadway Theater District that has been distorted by an extended game of telephone through many stagehand whispers and dosed with a certain amount of debt settling and character assassination. Often, the truth has been flayed alive and made into a wallet. "It is a stagehand rumor, so it might be 30 percent true."

Term of the Week: "using an earlier contract"

"Using an earlier contract": When a department head in a theater fights to get paid for something that is clearly not in the present contract, the roadman might say sarcastically, "He's using an earlier contract."

Term of the Day: slapped on the pee-pee

Slapped on the pee-pee--to get in trouble, to be reprimanded in a condescending, childish way from management. "The men on the fly floor were slapped on the pee-pee for talking loud during the quiet scenes in the play."

Word of the Day: Shoe-man Capote

Shoe-man Capote--a stupid stagehand, a shoe, "He's a real Shoe-man Capote," making a rhyme out of the dead novelist's name. (from Tim Altman, Broadway electrician)

Vocabulary Update

Here are some new terms I've come across in the past several months:

Getaway day: the last day of a loadout, when the final truck comes after the 10 a.m. coffee break and the stagehands leave early.
stay guy: The stagehand kept late for overtime when the other stagehands are cut at 5 p.m.
Broadway wrap--wrapping a prop gift box so that the lid can be taken off without ripping the paper. This enables the propman to use the box over and over.

Joke of the Day: Local #1 Interview

Despite being a fourth-generation member of Local #1 IATSE, the Theatrical Protective Union of New York City, I am embarrassed to say that I had not heard this joke. I had to hear it from a brother in Local #600 IATSE, which is the camera operators' local.

To understand this joke, you must know that Local #1 was once a fathers' and sons' local, where members could nominate one man (and it was all men back then) to join the local, and if you had two sons, you'd marry the second one to a local member with only daughters, so your son's new father-in-law could nominate him.

The joke is a man walks into his Local #1 interview. The union man interviewing him looks at him sternly and says, "I have two questions for you: Who's your dad and how is he?"

--Dylan Foley