Lighting My Way out of a Paper Bag

It had been a beautiful day outside, but I was stuck in a darkened high school auditorium the entire day. I missed the sunshine. It was late February, and the first real warm day of the year. I was looking forward to lighter days after a long winter as I programed another cue into the light board. Tech rehearsals for this show were grueling. It wasn’t because of their long hours, which I was used to, or the fact that I didn’t get to go outside that day, or the fact that I drove two hours to do this job as a lighting designer for a high school musical, or the fact that I had a very bad cold. It was that every moment leading up to this point had been a fight. I never planned on being a lighting designer, let alone a professional one.

“Providence was able to sneak in there and lead me to exactly where I needed to be next. In this way, my life has been a series of happy accidents,” wrote Jane Lynch in her 2011 autobiography Happy Accidents, which I had ordered on Amazon, because I was feeling lost. I really liked her performance as Sue Sylvester on Glee, and I found out she’s gay, like me, so I felt drawn to her book. I hadn’t anticipated how much her life story would resonate with me – sometimes it was eerily similar. We’re both tall, we both came from Catholic families, we both did high school choir, we both struggled with queerness and the closet, years of being lonely, and we both had a rough start to our careers. The difference was, she was at a place in her life, where she was extraordinarily successful, and I was experiencing that rough career start in real-time. She writes, as if speaking to me in her sardonic way from the pages: “If I could go back in time and talk to my twenty-year-old self, the first thing I would say is: ‘Lose the perm.’ Secondly I would say: ‘Relax. Really. Just relax. Don’t sweat it.’” I was twenty-three, and it seemed like I wasn’t going anywhere in life. Her solution: just be open and ready when opportunity presents itself and put your heart and soul into everything you do. Her approach was basically: say “yes” to every job [except porn], and make every job better, because you are a part of it.

That’s how I became a lighting designer and ended up stuck in a high school auditorium in New Jersey, two hours away from my house, on a sunny day, with a cold. I popped open a Dayquil tablet package, and washed it down with water from the crinkly plastic bottle from the gas station. I programed another cue. I usually enjoyed lighting design, but not this gig. Maybe it was the magical properties of the Dayquil or inhaling too much haze from the smoke machine on stage, but I started thinking hard about the string of “yes’s” that brought me to that droll place.

I had gone to college with the hope to be a high school history teacher. I was really inspired by my own high school history teachers, who were able to take the past and, essentially, tell it like a story. The past was incredibly theatrical, and I enjoyed that, because I was a member of the drama club, and our own show choir – before Glee made it cool. But just like the characters on that very popular show, I found a place of belonging in my high school drama activities, and eventually received the “Spirit Award”, in my senior year, for being the heart and soul of the drama club. As much as I wanted to do theatre professionally, my parents warned me that it was not practical, and that I should pursue something more stable like teaching high school history.

Not wanting to give up the performing arts, I double-majored in history and theatre, taking many education classes as well. I was poised to be a teacher, and then the economy crashed in 2008 – in what is now called “The Great Recession.” I was still in college, when this happened, and I slowly saw friends, who had already graduated into the educational field struggle immensely to get jobs. The only teaching jobs that were available to them were through programs like Teach for America, which places teachers in underprivileged schools, and they would have to move to different states like South Carolina or Hawaii just to teach. I can only remember two people in my graduating class getting teaching jobs the first year out of school. While teaching on the beach seemed a little attractive, I had no money to move across the country and be far away from my family and support system. Maybe I wasn’t brave enough, but I was about to make a decision that was either brave or entirely foolish.

“Mom? Dad?” I started. “If I’m going to be unemployed in this economy, I want to be unemployed and happy.” I explained to them that theatre was my real passion, and I was going to downgrade my history major to a history minor, and concentrate on earning a theatre degree. I decided that I wanted to be a director, because I enjoyed all aspects of theatre, including performance and tech, and, as a director, I would get to have a say in all of it. I learned that I was very good at it too. So I graduated with a theatre degree into a major recession.

The recession was bad. I can’t possibly overstate that. My friends and I filled out ten job applications almost every day for anything available. I couldn’t even get a job at the Lego Store at the mall. I ended up delivering pizza and volunteering with some other alumni, at my old high school, helping out with their drama program, where I had once found a sense of purpose and belonging.

The pizza place didn’t quite know what to do with me. I was incredibly efficient. While we waited for delivery orders to come in, it was typical for us to receive little tasks to keep us busy and have us earn our meager hourly rate in between tips. I finished all of these small jobs with time to spare and they eventually ran out of things to give me. They had me fold pizza boxes, and one day, I moved so fast that I folded every single one, and we had enough to last us weeks. The drama club at the high school, on the other hand, knew how to keep me busy.

It made sense. After all, one of the last times I felt like I knew what I wanted to do in life was when I was part of that drama program. I was enthralled by that same magical feeling – this time as a mentor to the students. I worked for free, which I was ok with, because I had never taught high school kids before. Since I was the most-recent college graduate in the building, with the freshest knowledge of theatre technology, I seemed to be the one who knew the most about how to operate the new light board and sound equipment they got, when they moved into a brand-new building. Over the course of that first year, I became the person who coordinated the tech and backstage students. I also did the lighting design. An opportunity presented itself, and I said “yes.”

If I had known, in college, that I would be spending so much time in lighting design, I might have paid more attention to how to do it. I only had one design class, and I learned some basics, but a lot of this involved learning on the job. I was a fast learner, however, and a diligent researcher. The school auditorium became my laboratory. I looked up techniques, watched videos, and tutorials. There were days when I showed up early just so I could experiment with the light board and test ideas, looks, settings, and effects. I read the light board manual from cover to cover. After a year of this, I felt confident enough to apply for professional lighting design jobs. After all, these jobs paid well, and were often available because fewer people have these skills – it certainly paid better than being an actor.

I remembered how I thought that I was lucky when I got cast as an actor in my first professional show right after graduation. A paid acting gig! It was very exciting. I drove into the city twice a week for three months, and at the end of the production, I received my payment. I opened the envelope with anticipation only to find that it was only sixty dollars. I wanted to cry. It didn’t even cover the cost of gas for driving into the city. If I recall, I spent forty of those sixty dollars at the bar that night, because what else was I going to do? Lighting design jobs paid more.

I got my first professional lighting job and made twice as much as I did with my first acting job, and only had to drive into the city for a fraction of the rehearsals. This theatre was using a different light board then I was used to, though, but I found the manual online, and was able to study it ahead of time. I took notes and arrived at the theatre early, on the day I was going to program the light cues, so I would be proficient in using the board by the time everyone else got there. It was a success, and a wonderful group of people, from the creative team, to the actors, to the fellow tech and designers. I was so glad I said “yes” to this one.

Lighting design would become my bread and butter for the first year or so out of college. It was a marketable skill that paid well, and I was able to learn as I went. If I took on a new job with a new light board, I would find the manual online or in a public library. I would stake out time to spend in the theatre alone with the board so I could practice and test things. Things were really exciting when I got my first job in New York City as a lighting designer for a one-act play in an Off-Off Broadway festival. “I am a professional lighting designer,” I thought to myself, as I rode the New Jersey transit line to Penn Station. I was very excited, and even considered that it could be a long-term career path.

At least, I was excited, until I took that job in New Jersey.

As I sat shivering with the onset of a fever, on an otherwise beautiful day, while stuck inside at the light board, I felt an existential crisis coming on. I figured: I already had a job with a high school, and I did very well. Surely, I could replicate that success at another institution. When I applied, I showed them my portfolio of the shows I had done already, including the professional ones in Philadelphia and New York. They hired me to design two shows, with two different directors. The first one was a big success, but the second one is where our scene opens.

Art is sometimes ambiguous. A director can communicate a concept for a “bright colorful musical” and a lighting designer can do their version of that, and it can look like something completely different from what the director imagined. As someone who likes to go in early to test things and program cues well in advance, I was even able to get the director’s approval on the looks of a couple scenes before tech, but as dress rehearsals went onward, there seemed to be more disagreements and disappointments with the way that the show looked. I began to doubt myself. After all, I wasn’t formally trained as a lighting designer, and I never planned on doing this professionally. It was just something that I fell into, through a series of “yeses” on the advice of a celebrity memoir, and I had only been doing it for a year. Each time I was basically learning as I went. I felt like a fraud.

The Dayquil started to wear off. I had finished programming the cues for the musical – or so I thought. That was already the second time I had to go back and re-program it to the director’s liking, but that night, rehearsal went all the way up to the beginning of the second act, before the director interrupted the show with a shrieking “NO! NO! NO! THIS IS NOT WHAT I WANT!” from the orchestra pit. “I WANT A BRIGHT COLORFUL MUSICAL!”

There might have been something else he said. I don’t remember his exact words. I do remember the silence that followed, and everyone staring at me in the back of the auditorium at the board. Everyone was afraid to talk. You could hear a pin drop. There was not a single whisper. Just stares from the student performers onstage, the band, the parent volunteers, the student tech crew. I was defeated. I wanted to scream back, “HEY! DON’T TALK TO ME LIKE THAT YOU PIG!” I know things can be frustrating, but that’s not the way to talk to people who work for you. But I didn’t have it in me. I was tired. I didn’t feel well. Everyone was looking at me. I silently stood up and walked over to the keypad and made the lights brighter and bumped the color. “Does that look good to you?” I peeped. “Yes,” he said, still agitated. The rehearsal continued.

The director’s treatment of me seemed to give others permission to treat me with contempt and disrespect. One night I went up to the light board and saw the words “Christen Mandracchia can’t light her way out of a paper bag” scrawled on the desk. It was a variation of the phrase that someone “can’t punch their way out of a paper bag” meaning that they were weak (if only they knew that my grandmother had taught me how to box). I don’t know if the metaphor translated well to lighting design, saying that I can’t “light my way out of a paper bag”, but the point was, someone – might have been a student or adult – wanted me to know that they didn’t like me, and they didn’t think I was a real lighting designer. Christen Mandracchia can’t light her way out of a paper bag. Even in my own high school, I had never faced this kind of bullying. Maybe they were right. Maybe Jane Lynch was wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t say “yes” to everything, and maybe putting your whole heart into a project just leaves you open to heartbreak.

Nevertheless, one thing I got from her book was that things started getting better for her and her career after she went to graduate school. Maybe I should go to graduate school. I started looking into programs for directing. In the meantime, the first high school I started working at began to pay me for my work, and I said “yes” to a job as a stage manager for a murder mystery comedy dinner theatre in the Philadelphia area. I had steady-ish employment in theatre for the first time since graduating.

One day, while stage managing the murder mystery dinner theatre, one of the actresses didn’t show up and all of her understudies were out of town. The cast and I made a collective decision that I would put on the costume and announce to the audience that I would read off the script. Say “yes” to everything and put your whole heart into it. I certainly did that day. I even added my own ad libs. The audience roared with laughter and applauded wildly for me at the end, appreciative of the extra work I did that day to make them happy. One of the cast members came up to me after the show.

“Hey,” she said. “You really saved our butts. Are you an actor?”

“I used to act,” I replied. “I mostly do lighting design now, in addition to stage managing these shows.” She smiled excitedly.

“You sound like a jack-of-all-trades. Have you considered grad school?”

My ears perked up. “Yeah, I was thinking of getting an MFA in directing. I was also looking into…” I paused, thinking about his one local school that I had been thinking about in the back of my mind. “I was thinking about Villanova too, since it’s local and my dad went to college there.” She could barely contain her excitement. It was if I had said the magic words.

“I am one of the acting scholar at Villanova right now! You’re just the kind of person they want there. If you can step into an understudy role at the drop of a hat, and do a whole bunch of different things, you’ll do very well there.” As she said this, I felt a kind of peace that I hadn’t felt in a long time. It was the promise of a sense of belonging and purpose, and being wanted and valued for the work that I can do.

As I was pulling away in my car, she ran up to my passenger window and waved for me to roll the window down. “I almost forgot! If you come to our open house, you can see our musical for free! I’m in it!” As she said this she dropped postcards for the musical through the crack of the open window and ran off gleefully. I went, fell in love with the program, applied, and got in. I started that next fall.

The program can be described – as it was by one of my professors – as “somewhere between rigorous and unreasonable.” I entered the program with just about the biggest inferiority complex imaginable due to my perceived failure as a lighting designer. I soon learned, however, that my professionalism was not determined by an academic focus in design, the small stipends I got paid, or the artistic opinions of high school directors or people who scribble on desks. It was my work ethic, my openness, and my determination to continue learning that made me – indeed – a professional. It was the attitude that allowed me to fold so many pizza boxes that the supervisors didn’t know what to do with me. It was the dedication of self-learning, researching in libraries, problem solving, experimenting, and showing up early. It was saying “yes” to opportunities – and I said “yes” to every opportunity that came up in my two years in graduate school. It was the ability to revise my work after receiving critiques – no matter how many times – and receive criticism with grace and patience (even if it was unnecessarily harsh). It was the ability to put on a costume and step into a role with no preparation – to make a job better because you are a part of it.

After two years of hard work, I not only received as master’s degree in theatre, I received a special award for service to the department – just like I had received the Spirit Award in my high school drama program. I had been searching for that same sense of belonging and accomplishment that I felt all those years ago. It took some time, but maybe Jane Lynch was right about saying “yes” and putting hour whole heart into your work. When you keep moving, the right things fall into your lap, and you find the next place you are supposed to be. I found a career and I found my Villanova family. This time, I was speechless for a happy reason. I managed to eek out the words, “I consider you all to be my family, and all that I’ve done for you is what any self-respecting Italian woman would do for her family.” I still don’t know what it means to “light one’s way out of a paper bag,” but I feel like that’s what I ended up accomplishing through a series of “yeses.”