A talk with Louis Patalano, Stage Manager How long have you been going on tour with the New York Philharmonic? Since 1976. That's almost 25 years. What does it take to be a stagehand? You have to "do it on cue." You have to be able to react quickly to different situations, especially on the road. It's just spur-of-the-moment. You have to make things up as you go along - especially when you're touring in countries that don't have the proper equipment. What are some of the different things stagehands do? The stage crew has to be able to do carpentry, sound enhancement, electrical work, props, and other things. They also run a spotlight for soloists. What happens to your routine when you tour? When we go on tour, there's a lot of travel, and we carry 22,000 pounds of equipment. I supervise packing it. Leaving the building, it usually goes into two 40-foot trailers. It has to be packed so that the cargo doesn't shift, otherwise, the trailer can flip from the weight. The instruments travel in trunks which are made special for each instrument case, like a bass or a harp. The cases are custom-built by a trunk specialist. We leave here with the trucks, go to the airports and palletize. That means you put the cargo on pallets. It's wrapped in plastic and a net to waterproof it. It locks into the pallets, and then it's loaded onto the airplane. When we land, it goes back on a truck. We load into the theatre, set the stage, check that the lights are right. Sometimes you have to be creative. Once I had to make steps out of boxes. It's a good thing I worked at the Metropolitan Opera. That's where I learned that. It's important to learn to say please, thank you, and excuse me in foreign languages. You have to learn about the language and culture, and learn to deal with people from different cultures. When you tour, you're all in it together, for long hours. You become very close, in high-pressure situations. You have to talk slowly and carefully, and keep a calm head when things go wrong. Did you ever have a big disaster on tour? I remember standing in a field in Argentina, waiting for the trucks. We had just come from Miami, which was warm, and Argentina was cold, and I had no warm clothes on. We special-loaded the cargo into trucks that weren't the right size. It JUST fit. By the time we got it all loaded, I was so cold that the guys cut the packing blankets and made me a poncho. They took me back to where they park the trucks, and brewed coffee in a sort of pipeline. It was awful, but I had to drink it in order to be polite. Another time in Argentina, we had to wait four hours to get through customs. When we finally got the paperwork through and got in, some of the equipment was off the pallets - all the string instruments, which are the most valuable. It was a sickening feeling to see that. When we got the stuff to the theatre, we found that they had put a forklift right through one of the cases, the most expensive cello case, and covered it up with tape! The cello didn't get damaged, just by a hair. We were so lucky. I like my job. If you like your job, if you picked something that you like to do, you don't find it hard to go to work in the morning.