near death experience with a sewing machine, a caravan and a handstand chair

Today is Saturday-set-building-day. I spent the morning dealing with my ailing computer with my dodgy computer-man and dropped by GJ’s on the way home. GJ’s are the dance fabric specialists and the glitter, spangle, tulle element there is very high. I bought cream cotton drill and ended up needing to go to spotlight for the right red gingham. I got round to Pigeon Hole by about 2pm. Luke was building the hills hoist, Christy was finishing up emails and developing a shopping list, Flick and EJ were there with friends developing their caravan show.

I set up the sewing machine next to the caravan and started on the doona’s and pillows for the bunks. Christy set off with her shopping list. Flick was on the roof of the caravan where they have built a little wooden stage and had her heavy handstand chair up there. I could hear their conversation and the little creaks of the chair just behind and above me.

I’m fine now, just a bruise, but the next moment was a scary one. I heard a gasp and a bang and must have put my hands up to protect myself because the handstand chair hit my wrist and shoulder before landing on the floor. I had a moment of sick, sick feeling in my stomach at the how hard the chair had hit my wrist. To everyone else it looked like the chair had smashed my head. Luke was there with his hand on my back in a second. Flick looked terrified. I had a moment where I thought ‘the first thing you do when you’re in shock is tell everyone your ok, I just need to check in with my body’ so I sat there at the table, still, breathing, checking my head and my arms.

Then I thought it wasn’t fair to leave them all that scared and said, ‘I’m fine. It didn’t hit me on the head, just my arm and my shoulder.’ Its hard to reassure people when all you want to do is cry, but I managed to convince them I was ok and then put my head on my arms on the table and sobbed the shaky, shocked fear sobs. Luke stayed right next to me with his hand on my back and his face right next to mine and the others got ice and water and talked about rescue remedy. I thought, ‘I don’t need rescue remedy, I just need to cry.’ After a while I stopped and hugged Flick who felt awful and together we moved the sewing machine table away from the caravan.

I spent the afternoon and into the evening sewing the long doona and pillowcase seams while Luke finished the hills hoist and moved on to the fence and Christy made laksa for us all, painted metres and metres of rope silver, fixed elastic on her kneepads and helped me think about the doonas. A big sense of satisfaction putting each doona and pillow in its cover and then folding the big pile of creamy linen. By ten o’clock at night I was feeling a tickle in the back of my throat and the bruise on my wrist and I kept standing there looking at piles of things that needed sorting and not doing anything.

Luke got the fence up – though not on castors or its proper feet – and we looked at it. It suddenly looked very tall. How are we going to get Christy over it? We looked and then stood with our hands high and compared our height made suggestions. Christy said, ‘lets try it now!’ laughing in the cold dark warehouse. No way we were up to trying tricks. “We’ll figure something out….” I left her beginning to tidy up and went home. I sat up in bed with my laptop and corrected and formatted and added to the script. Christy rang me at 11pm to say, ‘Let’s not go to Artplay in the morning. Let’s rehearse at Pigeon Hole…’ The idea of loading and unloading the set again was pretty daunting.