Oil and water

[fbhjr]

Of all the shows we do, the fire shows worry me the most. They get a good audience feedback, which is nice. But, I never worry about puppets scaring the audience for life. Or, swords razing a public park.
(Yes, we’ve broken swords and almost hit someone when it happened. That was very bad and I still worry about it. But, it won’t spread person to person like fire would.)

And, the worst fire shows to do are when it is humid. To give you an idea of how humid it was, we had to dry out the drum before we could use it.


Yes, danielgreenwolf did play for us Friday night and it was very nice of him to do so. No threats, at least that I know of, were required for him to help us out with that. He did a great job too. (I look forward to a time in the not too distant future when I can point to him on the TV and say “that guy once played the drum for us at a fire show.” The person I say that to will respond “Sure, the guy on TV doing magic in Las Vegas knows you. Right.”)

Anyhow, humid is a problem. The water builds up on the wick of the props and makes them burn hotter, longer and brighter. Combine that with what amounts to a thin fog and it looks great. But, it’s harder to control, and that worries me. Even just holding the hilt of the fire swords, which are almost a foot away from the actual wick, gets difficult with that much heat coming off of them.

It was enough that my squirt bottle of non-dairy creamer stopped up and I just had to dump handfuls of it onto the torch. The crowd didn’t seem to mind big fire balls instead of streams, but, the streams don’t threaten to set the ground on fire.

It did make the moon rise something to see. Maybe it’s me, but doing a fire show under a rising red moon was cool.
Still, I feel safer when we were on the frozen lake...

Comments

[evrgreen.livejournal.com]

That red moon on Saturday night was very cool - I was carefully driving my way back through the midst of heavy-moose country, where our band had played a gig for the town's "Old Home Days" festival, in Dorchester, NH. It is waaay out of the way, but the small town is very appreciative, and we get to eat lots of yummy BBQ'ed sausages w/ peppers&onions and eat lots of home made pie&ice cream afterwards. The red moon made me think of life on another planet, or something like that. AT least we don't need to normally worry about setting fire to stuff with our shows, though on occasion our PA system has been known to have issues when mixed with too much water... :^o

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

Oooo sausage!
I like sausage!
Pie too!
Sounds like a good gig!