The Magic Mirror
General ·The following is an essay I wrote for my college applications on a project my friend and I worked on my junior year of high school. Not wanting it to go to waste, I decided to post it here.
“Show me the beast!” An actress stands on a castle, clutching what appears to be an ordinary mirror. Right on cue, a student under the castle hits a button on his laptop, and the reflection in the mirror dissolves into the figure of a hideous beast. From my seat backstage, I pump my fist, proud to see the mirror and castle I spent so much of my junior year laboring over be appreciated by an audience.
This moment never happened. An actress did hold a mirror and the castle set was there, much to the delight of everyone who worked on it. However, the mirror that was used on those March evenings was a rented prop that didn’t do much of anything. Meanwhile, my perfectly functional mirror sat in the back of our workshop.
The epic of the magic mirror began in December. When we found out that our school was going to attempt Beauty and the Beast for our spring musical, my friend Metro immediately thought of a prop that some friends of ours had built for a summer production two years prior. The prop was an elaborately decorated mirror complete with flashing LEDs and a “magical” feature. With the press of a few buttons, a light hidden behind a one-way mirror would activate, revealing an image through the glass. The original prop, however, had reliability issues and a host of other limitations. Ignoring the already huge task of building the largest set any of us had undertaken, Metro, now stage manager, and I, his trainee, set out to entirely redesign the magic mirror.
The months that followed were the greatest ones of my high school experience. My stage crew buddies were the best friends I made in high school, and we spent an unhealthy number of hours working in the scene shop together. I supervised and instructed several groups of students, armed with power tools, as we worked to build the castle. Meanwhile, Metro perfected the cosmetic aspects of the mirror, and I completely redesigned the internals. I wrote software that allowed the illusion to be triggered over WiFi and wired up a more reliable activation mechanism, relying on a “Raspberry Pi” credit card-sized computer to be the brains of the device.
Tech week, the week of intense all-hands rehearsals before the show, lived up to its fearsome reputation. The intrepid souls of the backstage were in the theater until at least 9 o’clock every evening. Early in the week, someone told me that our director had spoken: our mirror would not be used. I had known for some time that a backup had been rented, but the news offended me. After all, he had never even seen us demonstrate what our device could do! Nonetheless, I was far to busy to waste time mourning over an old tennis racket equipped with a computer and some lights. I was disappointed, but that attitude got me through tech week.
“If the mirror really worked, why was it cut?” is usually the first response to this story. I don’t entirely know the answer. It’s possible that the director gave in and let us build it to get Metro, with whom he had a poor working relationship, off his back. Reports on the progress of the mirror were treated with apathy or outright hostility. At one point during tech week, an unrelated equipment malfunction damaged the set, and our producer remarked, “See, this is why we shouldn’t be spending so much time on that mirror!” The connection was lost on me.
The story of the mirror is definitely not a tragedy. It’s a tale of a disinterested director and two guys who wanted an interactive tennis racket to be their legacy. When I heard veteran members of stage crew telling the story to new recruits, I realized we achieved our goal. Just not quite how we intended.