Director's Notes: 166 - Delta (Patreon)

(as always Directors Notes may contain spoilers)

In the mid ‘00s, I worked at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in the Berkshires. I was Manager of Individual Giving, meaning I solicited donations and fulfilled benefits for members, things like early ticket sales, post-performance parties, free tote bags, and so on. 

The Pillow is a large campus nestled in the hills of Western Massachusetts, with 3 different stages, 2 rehearsal studios, 4 administrative buildings and almost a dozen residential cabins for interns, summer employees, students, and visiting artists. 

The summer festival is everything you want for a cultural event. Bring a picnic or eat at the café. Watch free shows on the Inside/Out stage, or contemporary young artists in the Doris Duke Theater, or major staples of modern and classical dance in the Ted Shawn Theater. 

From the staff’s point of view, though, it’s intense. We worked 60-80 hour weeks for the 10-week-long festival each summer, and you didn’t get much time to sit at your desk. There was always something else happening across campus that you had to be at, or someone else you needed to talk to. 

This was before the common use of Slack and text messaging, so tracking someone down was tricky. A few people had walkies, but they were mostly on the production side of things. On the administrative side of things, we had our office phones with an intercom feature. 

A couple times a summer, I would need to find someone who wasn’t at their desk, so I would get on the intercom and dial up an “All Call” which broadcasts out to every single phone on campus. These would generally go something like: “This is an All Call. If anyone sees David Chapman, please have him contact Jeffrey Cranor at extension 216.”

I always wanted these All Calls to be clear, so I didn’t have to do them again. It’s pretty disruptive as you can imagine to have people broadcasting to your phone a few times a day because they can’t find something. So I tried to speak slowly and articulately, and one day, I ran into my co-worker Patsy who said “Good day, Captain!”

I asked why I was suddenly being called “Captain,” and she said “Because you sound like a pilot when you do All Calls.” She held her curled palm to her mouth and did “pilot-voice”: “Uh, This is your captain speaking, if anyone knows where Norton is, please have him call me at extension 216. And for those of you on the left side of the plane, you can see the Grand Canyon.”

After that it was hard not to start all my All Calls with “Uh, this is your captain speaking.” And then follow that up with the most banal requests. 

All of that said, so I can tell you how delighted I was to hear Cecil’s “pilot voice” this episode. It’s so mundane, so dryly friendly, but the language here is so sinister, so frightening. It’s one of my favorite Cecil voices since the Whispering Forest. 

Unfortunately, the pilot in Episode 166 wants more than for the Marketing Manager to call him.

-Jeffrey Cranor
April 15, 2020