Stage Manager & Theatre Tech Hats

Stage managers, board operators, run crew and techies are the people in blacks who keep a show moving from the wings, and this collection speaks in their voice rather than the performers'. The vocabulary is theirs: gaff tape, spike tape, the prompt book, the headset, the ghost light. Stage managers arrive long before the cast and leave last, carrying a kit of sharpies, pencils and a penlight that one of them compared to a Mary Poppins bag. The jokes come from how the work really sounds. Calls run warning, then standby, then go, and the go comes after the department and number, so STANDBY LIGHTS 47 GO reads like a real cue call. Crew avoid saying go casually on headset, which is why THE SHOW GOES ON BECAUSE I SAID GO lands as a claim on the whole evening. Gaff tape is the answer to nearly everything, and THERE IS NO PROBLEM GAFF TAPE CAN'T FIX says so. GHOST LIGHT KEEPER nods to the caged bulb left burning downstage center when the theatre is dark, kept for safety and, depending on who tells it, for the ghosts. RELAX THE STAGE MANAGER IS HERE and STAGE MANAGER NO COFFEE NO CUES are lines the trade already prints on its own shirts and hats. Two badges, STAGE MANAGER and THEATRE TECH, cover the plain search terms. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat. Wear one through tech week, or give it to the crew as a closing-night gift.