Brief life update: Landlord problem sorted (for now, at least). My support system is awesome. I believe you have all been contacted about repayment, but if I missed anybody, let me know.
I have not bothered to tell my roommates this. I hope they are experiencing unbearable amounts of stress. The Useless Narcissist did eventually cough up his share, but the (Probably Soon-To-Be-Ex-)Wife has given me nothing yet. They can stew.
One of the NPOs I work with threw a birthday party for a friend of a board member back in February. I ran it for them, as I often do. I'm good at being an attractive, friendly person who knows where all the extra chairs are.
I rather like running these parties. They're full of interesting people that I will almost definitely never see again, so it doesn't much matter what I say to them. The birthday girl was 80, and a semi-retired "spiritual counselor" -- apparently, she was where the priests and rabbis and imams went when they needed to talk through their problems. She described herself as "spiritual krill", which amused me greatly. A bunch of her kids were there, and a grandson who was probably on the spectrum and could not stop talking about airplanes, and a musical theater actor from Manhattan who complained that Cambridge was not drinking hard enough at 2 pm on a Sunday, and a variety of other artists that told as many weird stories as there are feathers on an Amazonian parrot. Her Moroccan cleaning lady made a secondhand appearance by sending a half-sheet cake topped with blue frosting and chocolate-covered strawberries. They told me I should be eating their cake and drinking their wine with them, so I did.
One of the nice things about working in the arts is that if you can still do your job well with a glass of wine in your hand, nobody cares.
The board member who threw the party apparently thought I was great fun, because he got the coordinator to give him my email address so he could ask me where to send a thank you card. Which card, when it arrived, had a $100 check in it. Welp. I was paid to run the party in the first place, mind, but being an attractive friendly person who knows where the chairs are only gets you about $18-20 an hour.
I've never been told I can't take tips, but I've never asked either -- this one was the biggest I've gotten, but it's not the first. One of the more memorable ones was when I was working box office for a show where a gaggle of kids had come up from New York to perform with Boston locals. One set of parents had failed to buy their tickets before driving up from NYC, and the show sold out. The ticketing software didn't have any way to start a waitlist for shows with late seating, but there are always people who don't turn up, and even if by some miracle everyone made it (they didn't) that theater had bench seating and I was not paid enough to care if they were two people over fire code, so I told the parents to come back in 45 minutes, and told the manager that one couple had to duck out but would be back at intermission. I had no way to sell them a ticket and was fully prepared to sneak them in for free, but the wife did everything short of stomp her husband's foot and hiss, "honey, bribe the usher." He gave me a $20.
The bigger news, though, is a gig I've landed for mid-May. I got an email a couple months ago from one of the orgs I do livestreaming for asking if I could run sound for one of their shows. They had correctly guessed that I knew how to do this, but only because they don't understand the difference between running digital sound for a webinar/class and operating the 32-track analog behemoth they have up in their tech booth -- none of them are in any way technical, that's why they call me. I didn't expect a lot of help from the venue, but I ended up running the pre-show music off my phone, and the board off a random laptop using VLC, which is, uh... let's go with, not industry standard.
I thought my performance was adequate. Like, the show did happen, more or less as planned. The lighting designer apparently thought I did so well she specifically requested that I run sound for the next, much bigger show she was lighting at that venue. I am, apparently, "the best". I have learned to just say thank you and shut up when people say these things, because it's rude to argue with others over their own subjective opinions, but if that was "the best" I really have to wonder, what kind of unrepentant fuckups had she been saddled with before I came along?
Anyway, the much bigger show thought I was a perfectly reasonable choice(!!?!?!?!!?!), so I'm now signed on for that. I refuse to half-ass this anymore; if they're going to pay me sound tech rates, I'm actually going to be a sound tech, and do this correctly. Industry standard for this stuff is a piece of software called QLab, which is only available for Mac, and has rental licenses for a totally reasonable $5/day. I am not okay running $1500 of show off a computer that dies if you trip over the power cord, so the battle-scarred MacBook I inherited from a previous roommate has gone back to Apple for a spa weekend and a battery replacement, a surprise expense which I am only able to cover because the same superhero support network has indicated they do not need their loan money back in a hurry. So thank you for that as well! I have about a month to teach myself how to work QLab for real.
I've spent Easter feeding junk food to rats and trying to wrap my brain around the idea that someone thinks it's "totally reasonable" to pay me $50/hr to sit up in the booth and periodically click a large button marked GO. I have to keep reminding myself that all the tech stuff only seems straightforward to me because I have been mucking around with it since I was ten. I had a look at the service manual for the mixer before I tried working it the first time, and at one point it literally says, "This will make more sense if you look at the block diagram," so I suspect a large portion of that hourly rate is there just because this is terrifyingly complicated to other people.
[For the uninitiated, a block diagram is a simplified line drawing depicting the components and connections of an electrical circuit. For something like the mixing board I was dealing with, it's usually close to, but not identical to, the actual schematics. My father has designed custom circuit boards for a living since before I was born, so I'm well familiar with the things. But if you're not I suppose they look a bit like a Mondrian take on the Nazca lines. I probably couldn't troubleshoot a broken mixing deck from the diagram in the back of the manual, but I can follow it well enough to see where all the inputs and outputs are going.]
Still no grant money, not that I expected it to land on Easter. The waiting is the worst. A lot of my problem right now is that I need to raise my freelance rates for a lot of things, but until I get that cushion in place I can't risk losing any of the clients I currently have. Some money is better than no money, but some money is not necessarily enough money, which is the fundamental problem.
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