Last week, I turned 36. The day before and all day on my birthday, I did audio set-up for the Alabama Arts Council's Celebration of the Arts Awards, a huge event honoring Alabama native artists and contributors to the arts of all forms.

When I first learned I would be putting in a 14 hour plus day on my birthday, I was pretty ticked. I grumbled a lot about how that was pretty typical - I seem to usually work on my birthday, and/or have really terrible "day of" birthdays. The pessimist in me kicked into high gear, and I was pretty determined to have a miserable day. That lasted until sometime mid afternoon during the rehearsal block for the awards ceremony. I had decided to be on deck to manage the set-up and transitions rather than mix the show, letting my engineer have some mix time, as well as serve as an improptu deck manager. As my other engineer (working on deck with me) and the stage crew guys were standing in the wings cutting up and sharing war stories, I had two epiphanies.

The first was that I have reached something that is theatrical middle age. If 36 qualifies for biologic middle age is up for debate, and not the point. What I realized is that I've gotten to a point where (as it has been for years) I am young enough that many of my colleagues and contemporaries have been working as long or nearly as long as I've been alive. They think of me as a youngin', and top my theatre horror stories with those of manual light boards operated with 2x4's, pulling sound effects to cassette from records, salt water dimming systems, and full scale musicals with no more than 4 or 5 microphones - just to name few. Yet I'm now old enough that when I was splice editing my first reel-reel tape, my sound intern and his contemporaries were mastering the art of "potty training" or running around a play ground supervised by a kindergarten teacher. To them, I've become the veteran theatre tech who tops their horror stories of skipping CD's and SFX crashing with 24 channels of manual playback and transferring dance music from reel-reel to ProTools for clean-up and editing. I also realized, that I've gone from being the most junior department head, to being solidly in the middle of both age and experience.

The second epiphany went something like this... grumble grumble expletive expletive... I'm doing live sound on my birthday grumble grumble... hey wait! I'm doing live sound on my birthday! What better way to spend the day than doing what I love? Was the show my first choice... no. But it was live, and it was my craft. How many people get to do that often, much less on their birthday... but I did. How awesome is THAT?