pitt is it B)

"Make yourself useful." As a sophomore just finding the ropes in high school theatre tech, those three words were all Jocelyn, my senior mentor, would say.

I thought the world of theatre tech would be a breeze - all I'd need to do would be to show up on performance days, sit back, and relax behind my ETC light board. I'd press GO at the right times, run the show, and enjoy all the same perks (and food) as the actors. So as Jocelyn and the other new techs scrambled to hang lights and assemble platforms, I merely wasted away the hours, stood and watched, and mooched off the snack tables.

Then Jocelyn left. The other techs in my class and I were the only ones left on the roster, and I noticed: everyone else had a role. There was Julie and Rebecca on sets, our stage manager, our lighting girl and our sound girls. But where was I? In my loafing around, I had gotten left behind, without the knowledge or the experience to lead any aspect of a production.

Make yourself useful. Jocelyn had been telling me that for the whole year, and I'd never noticed until then.

My first advances in making up lost time were small, as I drilled two-by-four after two-by-four for the blueprints my peers had designed. Though my hands were sore after hours behind a drill, I began to notice ways in which I could be useful to the theatre department.

I made the room in my course schedule to be the first person in the school to take the tech theatre class. Noticing our constant safety violations, I pounded through the county’s dense safety manual and condensed it so the other techs could get licenses as quickly as possible. And when a new aspect of tech emerged, projections, I was the natural candidate, and I fell easily into the role.

Jocelyn's three words still play constantly in my head, like an emergency announcement coming through the PA system. Make yourself useful, she'll say, and I'll ask myself: Am I being useful? Do people appreciate me and the work I'm doing? Should the answer be no, that's all the motivation I need to push myself even harder.