20 STORIES FOR 20 YEARS

Corinne Stralka

Corinne Stralka has been a stagehand at Bethel Woods since the first season in 2006.

I'm a union stagehand. I'm part of the stage crew that builds the shows. We load them in and load them out. I started about 25, 26 years ago. I'm 67, yet I can still lift a motor.

I came in with the head rigger, and eventually we brought my son in. And I’ve watched that venue grow. When I got to Bethel Woods, the trees out above the lawn were little. I watched these things grow. And the shows got bigger and bigger and our crew got better and better. 

 

Being a stagehand is fun, and now I'm a rigger and I've been up in that grid, harnessed in. I've climbed up to 100 feet. It can be dangerous, and it can be dangerous for those working on the ground, too, because things can fall. Our venue is very safe, though. 

A lot of people don't know that when they see all the lights on the stage, none of that is there before. We hang it. If you came in the morning, you would see the riggers start with sending motors up, motor chains up, and then, you know, they're putting the lighting together. Then the lighting gets attached to the motors and the motors fly up the lighting and the sound. The video screen gets built and flown up–it's a big process. Then the band gear comes in. Then it goes backwards at the end of the night. We get done anywhere between midnight and 2 a.m. 

 

One time going home after a show, we got pulled over for going too fast and when they found out what we did for a living and where we were coming from, the officers asked us our favorite concert. I said, ‘Uh, I really liked when The Who played. They played side one of Tommy, which was really interesting.’ 

 

In the winter the robins nest up in the grid. When my son was an uprigger, we used to go up there and capture the birds and then bring them down the ladder. You have to put them in a towel. You have to try to catch them in the grid as you're running through the grid above the stage, and then we bring them down and let them loose under a tree.

One time there was a raccoon in the grid when somebody very famous was about to go out on stage. The raccoon was running across the grid and we didn't know what to do because what if he fell on the act? Never mind the stage hands or the road crew, but the act, you can't have that during a show. They got him out somehow. It was like this big emergency.  

 

We used to run cable under the seats, we no longer do that. Now we have a trough that it runs through that you can open up, because you really couldn't get in there–and it was a really dirty job. Once, when I came up to try to pull this cable, I was full of mud.

 

Once you become a stage hand when you go to a show, the first thing you do is you look up and you see how they did the lighting and how they did this and how they did that. Then you're like, ‘Oh yeah, there's a show!’ Because when you're working, you don't usually watch the show, or maybe only a little of it. I suppose it's the same if a doctor goes to a different hospital because he got injured, he's looking at everything. You know what I mean? 

 

Some shows we feel are great just because of what kind of build they do. The country shows are always amazing builds. Those are bigger tours, and their staging is bigger and sometimes they'll put what we call a thrust that goes out in the seats. They actually take out seats, expensive seats, to put this so he can walk out there.

 

If you don't watch how a show is built in the morning, you don't know it comes in pieces in trucks. One time we had, I think it was Rascal Flats or Brad Paisley, with 26 trucks. That's like an arena package. They had a silo out in the lawn.

 

My first impression of Bethel Woods was, I want to live here. You know, I just want to camp out in the back here. It’s the most beautiful backstage I've ever seen. A lot of us work in other venues, and we work very hard jobs, and when we come here, it's like a paid day off, you know, even though we're working and not sleeping. And you can actually see the show if you wanted to, if you had the time. 

 

And it's mostly men, no matter where I rig. But I'm older than them, so I could just tell them things like ‘I have children older than you,’ which I do. We just joke around, like when you're one of a few girls, you better fit in. And we can dish it out just as much.

 

I’m so grateful for being part of this beautiful, well-run venue from the cleaning staff and ground crew up to management and closest to my heart, the stage crew that truly makes it happen. We are a family.”