People hear that you travel for work and imagine something a little more glamorous than it actually is.
“You’re in Chicago this week? Nice.”
Technically, yes. My experience of Chicago may consist entirely of O’Hare, the inside of a rideshare, a hotel lobby, a loading dock, a ballroom with no windows, and then O’Hare again. But yes. Chicago was lovely.
That is the strange part about spending a lot of time on the road. You can travel constantly without really going anywhere. After a while, cities start becoming airport codes and hotels start becoming room numbers. You stop remembering which Marriott you stayed in because, after enough of them, they all seem to have been designed by the same committee sometime around 2007.
You wake up and need a few seconds to figure out where you are. What city? What time zone? Then you look at the call sheet and the machine starts again. Dock. Load in. Coffee. Rehearsal. Show. Load out. Hotel. Repeat.
The venues change, but the routine usually doesn’t. Ballroom carpet, pipe and drape, road cases, catering coffee. Somebody is asking where the freight elevator is while somebody else is confidently pointing in the wrong direction.
Even the little landmarks of the day start to feel familiar. The first cup of coffee becomes the second. Somebody realizes the room is colder than expected. At some point during rehearsal, lunch quietly becomes the most interesting thing happening in the building.
Then the show happens, and for a few hours everything gets very focused. Cues matter. Timing matters. The room fills up, the lights come on, the speakers walk onstage, and the thing everybody flew across the country to build finally exists.
A few hours later, the room is empty again. The cases close, the truck gets packed, and sometime the next morning you are back at an airport doing it all over again.
There is a weird kind of monotony to a job that constantly changes locations. You might work in New York on Monday, Dallas on Wednesday and Las Vegas on Friday, yet spend most of that week inside rooms that could have been anywhere.
And that repetition can wear on you more than you realize. Long days, inconsistent sleep, strange meal times and extended stretches away from home are just part of the job. It is very easy to get into a routine where the only time you spend outside is walking from the hotel entrance to the rideshare.
So when you can, go outside.
You don’t need to turn every dark day into a wellness retreat. Just get some daylight. Take a twenty-minute walk before call. Walk around the block instead of spending another break sitting at the tech table. Use the hotel gym, go for a run, stretch in your room or do whatever version of exercise you will actually do. Drink some water. Occasionally eat something that didn’t arrive next to a pile of fries.
Protect your sleep when the schedule allows it, too. We wear exhaustion like a badge of honor in this business sometimes, but being tired all the time isn’t particularly impressive. If you get a late call, you don’t receive bonus points for waking up at 6:30 anyway.
The same goes for staying connected to people outside the show. Call home. FaceTime your family. Text your friends. Send somebody a stupid picture from the road. Whatever works. It is surprisingly easy to disappear into the little production bubble where the only people you talk to are the same people you have been sitting next to on comm for twelve hours.
And if the road is starting to get to you, tell somebody.
That might be your partner, a friend, someone else on the crew or a professional who understands this kind of work. You don’t have to wait until something becomes a crisis before admitting that you’re having a hard time. Our industry is full of people who are very good at saying, “I’m good,” grabbing another coffee and walking back into the ballroom.
Every once in a while, though, something else breaks the loop in a good way. You get an afternoon off and actually explore the city. You find a great restaurant that isn’t attached to the hotel. You see the skyline instead of just driving past it. Someone on the crew says, “We should actually go do something,” and, against all odds, everyone does.
Those moments tend to stick with you more than the shows. After enough years on the road, you probably won’t remember every ballroom, but you will remember the taco place the crew found at midnight, the random afternoon off in a city you had never explored and the people who were on the same ridiculous loop with you.
The road can be exciting. It can also be exhausting, repetitive and occasionally indistinguishable from living inside a very large airport terminal. Both things can be true.
Take care of yourself out there.
-CTC Staff
