The First Tuesday in May…

It was the first Tuesday in May of 2015.

I arrived at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on 5th Avenue.

Anna Wintour wasn’t there.

The Met Gala was over.

The steel-toed boots on my feet and hardhat under my arm contrasted dramatically with the stilettos and vintage Whiting & Davis purse I had donned the previous evening when I was lucky enough to walk through the decadent gala spaces mere moments before they were aflutter with Kardashians.

The party had been a huge success.

It always is. ❤️ 

And frankly, I’m not exactly a Page Six-reading, red carpet-gawking kinda gal, but the Met Gala is pretty damn special.

That’s why I agreed to show up that day.

A fresh and exciting start

I had just started working with a major event production company whose role in that year’s Met Gala was to provide:

• The exterior tent structure that covers the red carpet

• The interior stage where Rihanna was slated to perform

Dozens of event companies were collaborating to pull the event together over many months of planning.

But I received my call only a few days before the event.

The project manager who was responsible for things on our end was needed at another job site the day after the Met Gala, so they wanted me to be on site for the load-out.

“All you’ll need to do is just show up to supervise the crew and represent management,” my new boss told me. “This has all been planned for months, it’ll operate like clockwork.”

Honestly? 

F*ck that guy.

Because what happened next felt like Billy McFarland had been put in charge.

The best laid plans

The outdoor tent structures blocked the entrance to the museum, so we couldn’t work safely while the museum was open the day after the Met Gala.

But the plan was simple enough:

• 6am - 10am: Remove the small tents

• 10am - 5pm: Crew goes home and rests while the museum is open

• 5pm - 10pm: Come back and remove the large tent

Oh, and Rihanna’s stage inside the museum?

My company was providing a completely different manager and crew for that. I didn’t even need to think about it.

So I was told.

It was 6am

We rocked up and hit the ground running. 

The crew was energized, the small tents were flying down and being stacked in neat little piles of erector sets on the sidewalk, and I was looking forward to some nice daytime relaxation before we would return for the evening shift.

Then the foreman approached me and asked a very simple question: “When are the trucks coming to haul this stuff back to the warehouse?”

Um.

I dunno.

I was just told to show up. 🤷

And, because I’m an idiot, I had never actually asked for any logistics documentation. So I didn’t have the answer to that question.

But I did have a phone, so I called our logistics manager back at HQ to find out.

Boy, was I utterly unprepared for that conversation.

• Me: “Hey, when can we expect the truck for the small tents at The Met?”

• Him: “What truck? Nobody scheduled anything.”

• Me: “How is that possible?? Can you send something ASAP?”

• Him: “I’ll see what I can do. Oh, and we don’t actually have a crew lined up for the inside, so I need you to take your guys in there to remove the stage.”

WTF.

It was like the entire company had forgotten — about THE MET GALA.

It was 9am — 3 hours and counting

So my day had just gone from…

👉️ “show up to a cool museum for a few hours and represent management.” 

to…

👉️ “we need you to work for 16-hours straight and coordinate one of the most complicated event tear-downs in one of the most high-profile locations in the world — completely on the fly”.

I broke the news to my crew’s foreman who, optimistically, said “the guys will appreciate the overtime, we’ll get it done.”

To this day, I admire the f*ck out of that guy. What a superstar. 

(You know who you are, KJ. ❤️)

I shifted my attention to the logistics that should have been finalized a month ago.

I began coordinating with the loading dock team at The Met, our team back at HQ, and the hoards of other production companies who were also trying to get their shit out of there.

Working outside in the early morning hours was heaven compared to what we faced inside.

The museum was open to the public, but they had shut down the rooms where the gala had taken place the evening before.

They also roped off a narrow pathway to transport everything to a single freight elevator and down to the loading dock.

It. Was. Chaos. 

It was 4pm — 10 hours and counting

Our ability to break down the stage was reliant on:

• Huge, complicated pieces of scenery being dismantled.

• Lighting and production equipment being removed.

• Tables, chairs, catering equipment, and a million other bits and bobs getting organized.

We were chipping away at the stage, but…

…we had no specs for it, nor enough of the correct tools required to tackle that project productively because, ya know, we weren’t supposed to be doing it.

And brute force was not an option. 🚫 

We were constantly under the watchful eye of The Met’s curator who (understandably) shat herself every time one of our tired, grungy-looking workmen got within a few feet of a priceless Monet.

To top it off, every single piece of equipment had to be hand-carried or carefully rolled single file over a masonite pathway in clear view of museum guests.

We were scheduled to begin taking down the large tent outside at 5pm, but there was absolutely no way we were going to meet that deadline.

It was 8pm — 14 hours and counting

We finally made our way outside again after painstakingly moving each piece of our modular stage out of the museum, and down to the loading dock.

I sold my soul to The Met’s loading dock manager to allow us to keep stacks of staging in the dock because we hadn’t received the truck for that load.

(I’m just glad he didn’t ask me for a sexual favor, because I probably would have done it at that point. 🤦)

And by now, nobody was answering their phones at HQ.

We hadn’t eaten —or even sat down— for 14 hours, so I ordered pizzas. 

Frankly, I should have just called it at that point, but the team rallied. Failure was not an option.

We began the task of dismantling the large tent that arched over the iconic steps of The Metropolitan Museum…

3-hours behind schedule.

I was optimistic that the big tent would come down fast and easy like the small tents had that morning, and we’d be out of there by midnight at the latest.

It was 12am (Wednesday) — 18 hours and counting

Dismantling the huge tent —which only 24-hours before had been filled with happily-buzzed Glitterati departing the Met Gala— proved to be both a difficult and dangerous task with such a tired crew.

It soared 30-feet into the air, and was precariously ballasted up the grand stairway.

Plus, it was noisy.

• We needed to use powered lull telehandlers and manlifts.

• There’s no way to quietly move massive metal beams.

• Communication is hugely important, so there was tons of shouting.

This caused the overnight manager from The Met to come tearing into our site claiming that “the people who run the world live across the street”.

She wasn’t wrong…

Apparently our noise permit concluded at 10pm… when the job was supposed to have been finished.

But she could see that we weren’t finished, and understood the implications of leaving a dangerous, half-dismantled structure sitting on the steps of The Met.

So she reluctantly granted us permission to proceed.

It was 5am (Wednesday) — 23 hours and counting

We weren’t finished.

Nobody could stand. Nobody could speak.

But they could yell — and throw punches.

Which is exactly what happened.

I didn’t blame them. Everyone was angry and delusional, and it’s surprising that it took 23 hours for a fight to break out.

But there was nothing more that could be done with the crew in this condition.

The foreman and I looked at each other, exhausted beyond belief, and heartbroken by our failure to finish the job.

We secured the site as safely as we could, and I left one last voicemail for the team at HQ telling them that we were leaving without finishing.

Then I walked home (which was ironically only a few blocks away from The Met), turned off my phone, and crashed.

Don’t be a scapegoat

What would have happened if I had said “no” when the logistics manager instructed me to take my team inside The Met?

He would’ve had to figure out a different solution.

Instead, I became his solution, and all-of-sudden, I owned a problem that I was in no position to solve.

It’s one thing to have a solution to someone else’s problem — and another thing to be a solution to someone else’s problem.

With the latter, you’re simply a scapegoat. 🐐 

Cheers! 🍻 

-Kristin