Sacred Ladders Continue
Now let’s continue with another little detail. On this particular day, Michael had decided that he wanted to hang this Gothic chandelier in the piano room, this being of the 25+ foot ceilings variety, naturally. Also consider that Michael doesn’t bother himself with trifles like “there is no fixture up there now and there is no attic in which we might attach any number of methods of holding the darned thing either.” In addition, according to Michael the thing weighed “less than 150 pounds” — which either means that we had six of the wimpiest people on set that day that I’ve ever seen, since it took six of us to lift it, or else (perhaps) Michael doesn’t bother himself with trifles like “actual weight” either.
So let’s agree that this was an engineering challenge. On the upside we didn’t have to have anything permanent, and it only had to look good from the various camera angles, so it wasn’t totally hopeless. We talked about it for awhile, and then we went and smoked some. And then we had us some Red Bull (or maybe it was Budweiser, I really can’t remember), and then we talked about it some more. … Finally we clamped a 4×4, through which we had installed an eye-bolt holding a pulley, across two roof beams way up in the ceiling. Then we ran a rope through the pulley and out through the “opening” at the front of the room, and then we tied it off to one of those decorative concrete fences that rich people have all over the place so we know where the paths are supposed to be. … Naturally. Hell, it was right ingenious it seemed to us, and all Michael said was, “Can we make it about 4” higher?” He got the Bugs Bunny blink from six of us then, although we did untie everything and raise it “four inches” — like we measured. Absolutely.
Well, you can probably see where we’re going with this. … We used many, many (often very tall) ladders to accomplish this task, and D.Minion was around to document the entire process which turned out to be over 40 minutes of video. In fact she was so excited that she actually forgot to take any still pictures, which is why you ended up with these screen-grabs here. Now this was curious enough, but it wasn’t until I had actually finished going through this entire “Day Three” story that I notice that somehow D.Minion had failed to even mention this monumental episode — at all — even in passing. Here was a thing that took up 40 minutes of MPEG and she didn’t even talk about it?
When I asked her about it, she said, “I didn’t? Isn’t that interesting? I wonder why.” And then she went back to doing whatever she was doing. We’ve talked about this earlier. We call them “DM Episodes” and we just move along. I then had somebody do the “screen-grab thing” to the video we did have, and you can see for yourself what wonderful examples of America’s finest engineering brains were at work here.
Out of kindness to you, we have even cut the available clips that D.Minion thoughtfully provided to just a little over three minutes, but we’re telling you, they’re really not very interesting. Still she was very excited about this process, and it seemed wrong to just ignore it (like she did in the story, but we’ve already talked about that). This was some darned fine creativity after all.
By this point it probably comes as no surprise that for the last decade or so I have been running across people that are fans of (or are at least aware of) Jeff Foxworthy. These people almost invariably hit me with their latest “Redneck” jokes, which are usually pretty funny, even if they do rather closely define my upbringing. You know this one? “If you’ve ever mowed your yard and found a car … you might be a Redneck.” Well we never did that obviously, but we have found many interesting parts of cars — little things like transmissions and such. Hey “yard” means very different things on a farm. Really. At any rate, I am pretty sure that … If you’ve ever hung a chandelier with a rope passing through the front window and tied off to your fence in the front yard … you might be a Redneck.
[Git ‘er done.]
