BWW Blog: Cheyenne Dalton - The Moment I Realized I Knew Nothing

I was sitting in a black plastic chair in a room with maybe seven other people, one that I knew, and six that I did not. I have sat in this exact chair before, and it was the exact chair that I sat in during my freshman required acting class. At that time, it was a chair I was unfamiliar with, in the front row, and shortly after that first day it reminded me of the things I did not know and did not desire to know. But this time was different.

I sat in this black plastic chair again last weekend, four times over the span of two days. I had a flashback of freshman me sitting very timidly in this chair when I sat down in it, a wide-eyed girl not unlike myself on Friday. I looked at the man standing in front of me with probably the same expression that I had when I looked at my acting professor my freshman year, and he grinned at us all probably the same way my acting professor did. But this time was different.

USITT Southeast's conference was this weekend, and I had the great pleasure of attending five masterclasses over two days with some incredible instructors. The first class that I took was Sound Design and Technology: Presenting and Designing for Live Events, taught by Kirk Powell from ATK Audiotek. I'm not sure what I was expecting when I walked in and sat down in a room of all men, some twice and three times my age. Men who had clearly been in this industry for a long time, and men who most definitely knew more about sound than I did.

I have to be brutally honest. 90% of the things that Kirk said, or the questions the men asked each other, went directly over my head. I don't know what kind of microphone Mariah Carey wants specifically, and I can't tell you the differences between a dozen different models of monitors. I'm not sure how to figure out the weight load and distribution for rig points, and words like "line array," mean nothing to me at this point in my life. I don't know how to tell what frequencies are producing feedback just by using my ears. I can't remember anything that this man talked about for two hours, because none of it made any sense to me.

But what I do remember was how I felt in that moment. I shouldn't have been feeling happiness, joy, excitement, or elation. I was dumbfounded for two hours on a subject that I want to pursue for the rest of my life. But I felt all of those things, and for this reason: I love to learn. Learning is one of my favorite pastimes, just as Jeopardy is one of my favorite shows. I can't get enough of the things I love; I want to know everything there is to know about everything, especially sound.

I am grateful for the things that I know, and equally grateful for the things that I don't know. I know one day that I will have mastered all the concepts I can't even dream about right now, and then some. And I hope that I never, ever, stop learning.