Behind the Scenes

Yesterday, the beautiful and talented Marié Digby returned to Cal (where she experienced one year of undergraduate life before pursuing her music dream) to perform at Cal Do Something’s Rock Your Cause Benefit Concert.

It’s pretty crazy how much goes on behind the scenes to put on a concert like this. We had a staff of about 30 students running around all over the place all day just to put the final touches together. Communication, coordination, and focus were essential. There was little room for error, even though many opportunities presented themselves.

But I must note, it was definitely nice to be able to flash my staff pass and get access to pretty much everywhere I wanted :)

I was in charge of handling all tickets (sales, seating, will call, the whole shebang) and it was madness. Mind you, the concert venue was Zellerbach Hall, which seats 2000 people.

It was extremely complicated allocating seats individually, with many requests from people to sit with their friends, and dealing with mis-sorted and missing tickets minutes up until and after the start of the show. The ticket room was a pretty stressful place to be in those two hours when it was open before the show. And that’s not even mentioning how ticketing was going in the days leading up to the concert.

1 of 2000

I had a bowl of cereal at 9am and didn’t eat again until midnight. Busy, busy, busy all day long. The hunger sort of subsided into the state where I didn’t really feel anything at all anymore. My body just kept going… pretty much because it had to.

I was in the zone, and stuff needed to be done. It was a longgg day, starting to work at 10 in the morning and not getting home until 1 at night.

Through all of the chaos of yesterday, somehow everything got done and the concert went off without a hitch. It was a great success and I’ve heard from several people already saying that they loved it.

As all the members of Cal Do Something finally got to breathe a sigh of relief at the end of the night, I couldn’t help but feel so proud of us as a team and what we were able to put together. In just a little over a month, we pulled off an awesome concert with over 1500 people in attendance. Not too shabby. Look out for even better things to come!