The Practice of Caring

Behind the scenes at the Oakland Coliseum during a mega-conference.

There was always something.

The right toothpick for the pintxos. The correct size compostable cup. Straws cut shorter so they fit neatly into miniature bottles. A fountain that needed to be turned off so wedding guests could hear the vows. Four thousand tiny martini glasses purchased because they were exactly right for one particular dish.

For eight years, a week before an annual concert event in Golden Gate Park, I filled bee traps with hot dogs and tucked them into the bushes so the kitchen tents would be less overwhelmed when thousands of people arrived.

This was event production.

The beautiful part happened later.

Before that came measurements, permits, fire watches, loading docks, power, parking plans, staff schedules, green rooms, rental orders, scripts, floor protection, timelines, contingency plans and a thousand decisions no guest would ever know had been made. I measured lawns twice before ordering tents because being wrong by six inches could suddenly become a very large problem. I photographed carpets so linens could be selected against the actual room. I made sure the Wi-Fi worked before guests needed it. I put directions to the closest emergency room in every event binder, just in case.

For over two decades, my job required me to live about ten steps ahead of the present moment. You learned to imagine the problem before it existed. Where will that truck park? Can the band hear the show caller? What happens if it rains? Where does the chef wash a knife? Will an elderly guest be able to make that walk? Can anyone hear the vows over the fountain?

The best events looked effortless.

They were anything but.

And the people who made them happen were some of the hardest-working, funniest, most talented people I knew. Chefs, captains, bartenders, stagehands, florists, rental crews, lighting teams, drivers, assistants and producers moved through rooms while everyone else was having a party.

I loved my crews.

I brought them snacks—carrots, chips, protein bars, cookies—because somebody working a fourteen-hour day will eventually need something they can eat with one hand. I made sure staff meals were good. I created “Above and Beyond” awards because I wanted people to know when their work had been noticed. I gave inexperienced staff real responsibility because the only way to become experienced is for someone to trust you before you completely know what you’re doing.

I tried to thank vendors personally. I respected their craft. On enormous events, I often hired people who had become close friends because I trusted them when things got complicated. Sometimes I took candid photographs of clients and teams during production so later, after the deadlines and exhaustion were forgotten, they would have pictures of themselves laughing together.

Because logistics were never quite enough for me.

I wanted there to be an experience.

From handmade florals to selecting the perfect food vessel, sometimes caring about the details meant making them happen myself.

I wanted someone to walk into a room and feel something. Something beautiful, unexpected, artistic, funny, moving or interesting enough that they might still be talking about it in the car on the way home.

I learned welcoming remarks in Spanish for guests arriving from Argentina. I pointed out the prettiest places with the best light for wedding getting-ready photographs. I wrote menus so the food felt like part of the story. I reset lighting again and again because a room can technically be illuminated and still feel completely wrong.

I made decorations in my living room. For one Halloween event, I built a full-size mausoleum out of Amazon boxes and faux-stone paint for a Thriller graveyard. For another, I glue-gunned and painted a six-foot Oscar statue for an elaborate themed event.

There were second walk-throughs and third walk-throughs. Timelines revised until the timing actually made sense. Venue archives filled with wall colors, carpets, furniture, contacts, load-in routes and all the strange little things that could save the next producer an hour of trouble.

Care, I eventually realized, is often simply attention followed by action.

You notice something.

Then you do something about it.

Sometimes that meant moving a chair.

Sometimes it meant bringing the keynote speaker a Coke.

Sometimes it meant pulling a man’s pants off.

At one event, a chef dropped burning Sterno down the front of himself and caught fire. I got his pants off, got him onto the ground, called the EMTs and sent him to the hospital with his wife, who was also the lead chef.

And then I turned around.

The event was still happening.

Governor Jerry Brown was the guest of honor at San Francisco City Hall. The kitchen had suddenly lost both of its leaders, and a line of chefs was looking for direction.

So we finished the event.

Another time, a chef badly cut a finger. I held them close so they couldn’t look down and see the injury while we got help. I drove someone else to the emergency room. When a chef was afraid to make the first cut into an elaborate cake, I took the knife.

When we ran out of ice cream forty-five minutes into an event, I drove to Smart & Final, filled my car nearly to the ceiling with tubs of it and raced back.

Sometimes caring was elegant.

Sometimes it was ridiculous.

Sometimes it was being furious and doing what needed to be done anyway.

One of the clearest examples happened at three o’clock in the morning.

A union crew was scheduled to begin a twelve-day build at a pier venue. They needed to start on time. The venue manager had agreed to meet me there to open the building.

I arrived.

The crew arrived.

The venue manager did not.

My baby was asleep in a car seat in my Volvo.

On the other side of a locked fence was the beginning of a twelve-day construction schedule involving union labor, production deadlines and an event that was not going to move because someone had overslept.

I was furious.

And I climbed the barbed-wire fence.

I still occasionally wonder what would have happened if the police had driven by at exactly that moment: woman climbing into a locked pier at three in the morning, baby asleep in the Volvo.

But the crew got in.

The build started.

The event happened.

No one attending it ever knew there had been a problem.

That is one of the peculiar things about production. When you do it well, the evidence of your best work often disappears.

The tent fits. The truck finds the dock. The food arrives. The fountain stops before the vows. The chef gets medical attention. The lights come up at the right moment. The guest gets the Coke. The show starts on time.

Everyone goes home thinking the evening simply happened.

Behind that apparent ease is usually a group of people caring like hell.

There is a line from Wag the Dog that always made producers laugh: “Piece of cake.” Dustin Hoffman’s character says it no matter how absurd the problem becomes.

That felt familiar.

Not because anything was ever actually a piece of cake, but because somebody had to make everyone else believe it might be.

For a long time, I thought that was simply what good work meant. Something needs doing, so you do it. Something goes wrong, you fix it. If you make a mistake, you acknowledge it, apologize and make it right—preferably better than right. If someone is overwhelmed, you stay calm. If somebody is scared, you stand beside them.

And if everybody can still laugh, you can probably get through the next problem.

Humor mattered.

It wasn’t that things weren’t serious. Often they were very serious. Humor was perspective, or at least an attempt to hold onto some. It gave tired people a little room to breathe. It made impossible days feel temporarily possible.

I tried to keep that perspective for the people around me.

I didn’t always keep it for myself.

I got very good at being the person who would figure it out.

There is satisfaction in that. Competence feels good. Being trusted feels good. Creating something beautiful with people you admire feels good. I loved a great deal of my life in events.

But there is another side to being the person who always cares.

People begin to rely on it.

Then expect it.

And sometimes exploit it.

I spent months collecting and making decorations for elaborate holiday events, only to have them dumped in an alley afterward, where rain destroyed much of what I had made. At another job, decorations were dumped into my office until they stood chest-high.

An assistant obtained my payroll password and altered her timecards for months.

A temporary employee went into my purse, stole my credit card and charged thousands of dollars to it.

Yes, she had eaten my snacks too.

I had bosses take credit for work I had done. I was sometimes left out of introductions while standing in rooms I had helped create. I was yelled at by stressed clients for things I hadn’t caused. Once, someone with considerably less experience told me to stand in a corner.

There were plenty of human mistakes over the years, including mine. But I believed in taking responsibility. If I got something wrong, I owned it. I apologized. I corrected it. Then I kept moving.

Not everyone operated that way.

Still, I kept caring.

I was often the first person in and the last person out. And sometimes I came back the next day, after the flowers were gone and the guests were home, to pick straws out of clients’ bushes or walk a soccer field in a grid looking for tiny pieces of cut zip tie.

Nobody photographs that part.

By then, the photographer has already captured the beautiful version.

For years, I was proud of my capacity to keep going, and some of that pride was deserved. I worked with extraordinary people and helped create extraordinary things. We solved impossible problems. We made people laugh and cry. We built rooms that didn’t exist the day before and disappeared the day after.

But the work also took things.

Producer. Hostess with the mostest. Making the beautiful part look easy.

I missed school events.

I worked hours that made normal family life nearly impossible.

There were years when I worked constantly and still barely earned enough to support myself.

I absorbed other people’s stress because somebody had to keep the room calm.

I gave and gave and gave because I had so much to give.

And eventually, some of that care became resentment.

That was difficult for me to understand.

I thought resentment meant I had somehow become less generous. Less kind. Less willing.

I don’t think that anymore.

I think resentment was information.

It was the part of me that finally understood that caring endlessly for everyone else while repeatedly excluding myself from the equation wasn’t generosity.

It wasn’t sustainable.

I have an enormous capacity to care. I know that about myself now. I don’t think I can change it, and I am no longer sure I would want to.

But capacity is not the same thing as obligation.

Not everyone deserves unlimited access to our attention, loyalty, creativity, time and energy simply because we are capable of giving them.

That doesn’t mean becoming hard.

Kindness can still be abundant. Respect can still be abundant. Human decency should be abundant.

But there is a difference between caring and being consumed. A difference between taking responsibility and carrying everyone else’s responsibility. A difference between generosity and disappearing.

That distinction took me a very long time to learn.

I still notice things. I still want the room to feel right. I still want the experience to mean something. I still notice when someone is frightened or overwhelmed or needs a hand.

I still care.

Probably more than is practical.

But these days I am trying to practice something I never practiced particularly well before: including myself among the people worthy of that care.

The familiar instruction on an airplane is to put on your own oxygen mask before helping someone else.

For most of my life, I understood the words but apparently believed they applied to other people.

I’m beginning to understand them now.

Maybe one of the hardest forms of care is learning that the person doing all the caring counts, too.

I don’t want to learn how to care less.

I want to learn how to care without disappearing.

There will probably always be a fountain that needs turning off, a frightened person who needs someone calm beside them, or a field with a few zip ties left behind after everyone else has gone home.

I will probably always notice.

I will probably always care.

The practice now is remembering that I am here too.