Post 451 - HOLD, PLEASE: Stage Managing a Pandemic

HOLD PLEASE: Stage Managing a Pandemic is now available on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and Audiobook versions with the hardcover version becoming available very soon.

https://www.amazon.com/Hold-Please-Stage-Managing-Pandemic-ebook/dp/B09TQ138MG/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1GW0LOYIW8FR3&keywords=hold%2C+please+stage+managing+a+pandemic&qid=1648318352&sprefix=hold%2C%2Caps%2C148&sr=8-1

When I started writing at the beginning of the pandemic, one of the people who started reading what I was posting was Rick Sordelet. Rick Sordelet is a friend that I knew as a Broadway Fight Director and Stunt Coordinator. 

We met and worked together on Titanic, the Musical. For anyone who saw the show, there is a terrifying moment towards the end of the second act when a unit onstage the size of a train car elevates and starts listing at a 45-degree angle. As it tipped, Michael Cerveris was inside it, singing, with furniture sliding down and crashing around him. Much of the rest of the cast were up on the top holding on for dear life.

Downstairs, the furniture was all on tracks and was released to slide down at prescribed moments in the song so that Michael could safely get out of the way. Upstairs, there was only a railing on the upstage side. There was nothing on the downstage side or on the two ends to keep people from falling off. Rick choreographed it all so that any single person was never more than two people away from someone holding on to the railing. If you were not holding onto the railing, you always needed to have two people holding on to you who not moving and firmly anchored. As the downstage actors moved, the people holding them could only release them when the next person who was grounded took hold. It looked like sheer chaos, but it was meticulously crafted to keep everybody completely safe.

Rick’s company, which he created with his son Christian Kelly-Sordelet, who is also a Fight Director, is called Sordelet, Inc.

Rick then started a publishing company with his good friend, novelist David Blixt. That company is called Sordelet Ink (see what he did there?). As I was writing the daily posts, Rick started talking with me about turning them into a book. The result of those discussions is Hold, Please: Stage Managing a Pandemic.

I didn’t start out writing a book. I think if I did, I never would have finished it. I started writing to try and create some order out of the actual chaos that was swirling around us in those early days. We seemed to be sinking and my thought was that if I could create some sort of guard rail that it would be easier to navigate.

I will be forever grateful to Rick for championing me through this. I will also be forever grateful to his remarkable and talented business partner David Blixt for the overwhelming amount of care and attention that he lavished on me. In between carting his kids back and forth from wherever it is that kids are carted back and forth from, he managed to format and proof a 550+ page book. His patience in answering the questions of a first-time novice and incorporating the endless list of revisions, corrections, and changes that I ferried to him on almost a daily basis seemed boundless. I, frankly, would have taken out a hit on me. If there are any mistakes in the final versions, they are all on me, never on him.

To Rick and David, I have enjoyed every minute of this incredible ride and I am beyond grateful to you both for helping me to achieve a dream.  Check out their site and in particular the wonderful books of David Blixt!

Thank you, both.

And thank you to all of you who read my posts and continue to read and look at my photos. You all have my undying gratitude.

And, of course, more to come!!!

https://www.sordeletink.com/