This post is going online just two days after April Fool’s Day. According to history.com:
April Fools’ Day—celebrated on April 1 each year—has been celebrated for several centuries by different cultures, though its exact origins remain a mystery. April Fools’ Day traditions include playing hoaxes or practical jokes on others, often yelling “April Fools!” at the end to clue in the subject of the April Fools’ Day prank. While its exact history is shrouded in mystery, the embrace of April Fools’ Day jokes by the media and major brands has ensured the unofficial holiday’s long life.
Some historians speculate that April Fools’ Day dates back to 1582, when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, as called for by the Council of Trent in 1563. In the Julian Calendar, as in the Hindu calendar, the new year began with the spring equinox around April 1.
People who were slow to get the news or failed to recognize that the start of the new year had moved to January 1 and continued to celebrate it during the last week of March through April 1 became the butt of jokes and hoaxes and were called “April fools.” These pranks included having paper fish placed on their backs and being referred to as “poisson d’avril” (April fish), said to symbolize a young, easily caught fish and a gullible person.
Germans do not practice April Fool’s jokes very much, but they do have a word to mark the discomfort others feel when something goes wrong — any time of the year. This German word Schadenfreude does not have a direct translation in English. One dictionary calls it malicious joy, another says spitefulness. For me, it is the diabolical satisfaction one gets watching someone else slip on a banana peel and end up in a mud puddle.
This blog has talked about many of the things I have been called upon to perform for large and small groups. I have never meant them to be egotistical. But today I would like to turn the tables and tell you about six of my most dramatic failures.
I would love to say that none of them were my fault and in fact I took no overt action which caused any of them. But when you are in charge you have to do everything in your power to avoid unfortunate occurrences. Sometimes it even means deciding to create an alternate plan of action.
You are allowed to put on your Schadenfreude tee-shirt and be thankful they didn’t happen to you. And come back next week for more of the same.
1. Coffee Fit for an Emperor
Cesar’s Place Hotel has an enormous ballroom which can be subdivided using electrically-powered partition walls. I had 2,000 members of my association in one section of the ballroom attending a high-powered educational program. At 10:30 the moderator was to say to his audience that it is time for a coffee at which he would turn to his left and gesture at the huge divider wall that would disappear into the slot designed to hold it as it accordioned into sections. As the wall disappeared a refreshment break fit for Cesar would be waiting and the participants could simply walk over and help themselves.
10:30 arrived and the moderator delivered his line with a flourish worthy of a master magician, upon which NOTHING HAPPENED. I was near the base of the stage on headphones coordinating all the technical aspects. The movable wall was controlled by a key in a panel in the corner of the room. At that point I realized that the hotel staff member with the key was not at his post like he had been five minutes earlier. I later learned that he had gotten the times confused and thought he had enough time to take care of some mundane matter exactly when he was needed.
I had to step onstage and whisper to the moderator that he needed to instruct people to exit at the back of the hall turn left and enter the next room where their grand coffee break awaited.
What I did wrong was to assume that the hotel staff member understood and cared as much about the critical timing of moving the wall as I did. I should have had one of my staff members standing next to him where the motorized wall was controlled.
2. Don’t trample the saint!
The Rotary Congress had many amazing speakers, none more noteworthy than Mother Teresa. She agreed to speak to us in order to make an appeal for support for the poor in places like India. An audience of 18,000 anxiously waited to see her in Sao Paolo, Brazil. She was sequestered in our green room behind the stage while awaiting her cue.
Serving as stage manager, I went to get her when she was about to be introduced. But when I came out with her, I saw a sea of avid fans rushing toward her in the very corridor we had to traverse to get to the stage. Our security had broken down and I immediately began to worry that this woman who was 1.52 m (5 ft) tall might get crushed as people at the back were pushing those ahead of them to try to get closer and see her.
I was ready to turn her around and retreat until order could be established. But then an amazing thing happened. This small woman with a soft voice lifted her arms and told the crowd that she needs to get to the stage. She parted them like Moses parting the Red Sea and we walked without problems to the stage. There was something about her intensity and conviction that made a loud voice or physically forceful presence totally unnecessary.
3. Best Laid Plans
When you must use an exhibition hall to accommodate your audience of more than 20,000, you will need a big stage and video screens so that those in back can see what is happening (think rock concert). And like a rock concert you need to pull out all the stops making it a spectacle. For the organization’s 75th anniversary the local club decided to stage a pageant surrounding the life of the organization’s founder.
The first charitable act of the new club he founded was to replace the horse that a local doctor has used to make house calls in the countryside. When his trusty steed died, he could not get to his more distant patients who often could not come to him.
So the creators of the pageant decided that they wanted to bring a horse on stage as part of this reenactment.
Ramps were built on either side of the stage so the horse could be guided up one side and down the other. They rehearsed and all went well. But with more than 20,000 people who responded enthusiastically the moment they saw the head of the horse, the poor animal panicked and quickly ended up with one foot off the ramp.
All we could do was stop the performance, kill the lights and ask the audience to remain in their seats and be as quiet as possible while the horse’s trainer first calmed him and then guided him to get all four feet in the ramp, walk up and across the stage and down the other side.
The large audience was very respectful for the 20 minutes which were needed for this process and the horse left unscathed, to our great relief.
Lesson: people are not the only ones who get stage fright!
6. Nightmares about Flags
Rotary was very proud of its representation in many countries – more than 180 when I was working there. Each world congress began with the ceremonial procession of all the flags of the nations which had Rotary clubs. They were paraded down the center aisle by boy and girl scouts and placed in stands making a backdrop on stage. The flags were stored in steamers trunks and their poles were kept separate. So the day before the opening ceremony one of my tasks was to direct the fixing of the flags on poles, taking careful attention to fixing each of them upright. (A flag presented upside down is a sign of great distress.) And then they had to be laid out in alphabetical order so that an announcer (often me) would read out the country name as the flag appeared on stage.
Only once while I was there did we have a mishap – and it was not the fault of my loyal staff. Sometime between the time we laid out the flags and the presentation, some person or person got into the hall and reversed the position of the South African flag, a statement about their Apartheid policy. Rotary sought to remain politically neutral and this statement did not belong in our opening ceremony.
South African flag 1928-1994
As the flag appeared on stage South African representatives saw its inverted position with the blue at the top and became agitated. Of course the majority of the participants did not notice it. I decided to take no action until the end of that session, at which point I took the flag backstage, fixed its position and returned it to the flag stand and worked to calm the agitated South African delegates.
To my knowledge, this had never happened to any of our flags before and therefore it never occurred to me to put overnight security on the room where they were kept.
See next week’s blog post for more on this topic.
Herb