June/25th/2011
A couple months ago Donna Fawbush of the Dakota Prairie Playhouse approached me with the request that I run sound for Dakota State University faculty member James Booze’s wedding. This sounded like a wonderful opportunity so I contacted James to hammer out their needs. It turned out to be fairly simple set up: a headset mic for their pastor, a handheld wireless mic for the couple to say their vows and have the brides daughter sing, and one monitor so the daughter could hear herself and her karaoke track. Simple compared to most everything I’ve done but the fact that I only had one chance to run through the event before the wedding made me a bit nervous. I didn’t have a script and one false move and I would have a couple hundred necks craning to look at my booth.
I arrived early with my bow tie and game face on, only to find that none of the boards were getting power. Obviously I handled the situation by systematically checking everything that could be the problem, and panicking. What was I going to do if I couldn’t get the board to work? I had left everything in a working state the night before. The prospect of delaying a concert by fifteen minutes is an annoyance, but the prospect of delaying a wedding fifteen seconds had me sweating. Luckily I had sense enough to call someone who knows more than I do: Dan Mortenson. He suggested I check the breaker boxes and lo and behold, someone had flipped the breakers sending power to the sound booth.
Dodged that bullet, made sure everything had fresh batteries, checked all my levels and queued up some easy listening, a mix predominately composed of Nathan Edwards and Tyson Rupp with a little Frank Zappa, Toh Kay, and Bright Eyes for variety. Things continued smoothly from there. I played Bruno Mars’ “Lazy Song” for the wedding processional, at James’ request, John Williams’ “Imperial March” for the beginning of the bride processional, also James’ request. Of course there was loads of laughter and even the bride couldn’t help but laugh, James called it his last act of defiance before he was married.
The headset mic gave a good loud signal and Pastor Elizabeth spoke very eloquently. She handed off the spotlight to the bride’s daughter sooner than I had expected but I managed to recover from that shock pretty quickly. She sang Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be” and it was pretty easy sailing from there. During the vows I had a little trouble getting the wireless mic as hot as Pastor Elizabeth’s headset mic, but I kind of got the impression that they were speaking softer than they normally would have. It was all downhill after the vows, I just had to play some outro music and tear everything down.
After everything had died down, Pastor Elizabeth came by to give her mic back. She said she felt everything went pretty smoothly, made some small talk and asked if this was my profession. I went on to tell her that I’m still a student but I do stuff on the side to build my resume. She asked if I would contract out to make improvements to her church in the Madison area. I told her I would be happy to and that I was actually looking to do an internship, I gave her a business card and she said she would be in contact.
Hopefully things pan out and I can keep building up the ol’ resume.
