The Trade

Back in November, we traded a future show for a beautiful baby grand piano. The time finally came this weekend for us to fulfill our end of the bargain. In order to do this show right, we needed to supply a "line array" of speakers that "fly" from the rafters. It always makes me nervous to suspend heavy things over unsuspecting people's heads but there are safety ratings and guarantees that bring me a little comfort. We picked up these fancy speakers in Salt Lake on Tuesday and, using the genie lifts provided by the civic center, we went up, up, up into the tip-top of the ceiling to hang them with heavy-duty span sets. I was a little freaked out by the ascent but managed to help Rob anyway. I took this picture while looking down on the skinny little genie-lift legs that are the only things keeping me from plunging to my death:

After the speakers were hung we had to run the cables. Rob isn't too crazy about heights so it's not easy for him to be up this high. He's macho, though, so he never complained.
We also had to supply "intelligent" lights for this show so we rented 4 Accu-spots from another company and bought 2 of our very own. (The lights we usually run are par cans or "dumb" lights.) Dale is comfortable with the computer program needed to run these lights so he was our lighting guy for the event. This is one of our new toys:

And this is what the intelligent lights look like when they are in use:

Our time and equipment was needed for three shows- two on Friday and one on Saturday. The kids and I chose to go to the show on Friday afternoon and it was really good. The group is called Barrage and they travel all over the world with their high-energy performance. They sing, dance and play violins to a wide variety of music. They obviously love what they do and they connect really well with their audience. Gloria especially loved the show and even had a chance to meet the girls afterwards. I'll be posting some of Rob's pictures from Saturday night and a You tube video of one of their performances in the next day or two.

I think this was a pretty fair trade. . . for us anyway. :)