Nap Item

When I was working at ABC, we had a daily document called the "Order of the Day," which gave an item number to each scene or piece we were shooting that day and listed the cast involved. It created a simple way for every person in every department to know where we were in the day. If we announced "Taping Item 33," the prop department would know to pull Item 33 props, the wardrobe department would know how the actors should be dressed, and the whole building would have a pretty good idea of where we were in our day. In the time I worked there, we went from twenty item days to thirty item days and eventually sixty item days--scenes got shorter (so, many short scenes instead of fewer long ones) and budgets got tighter (so, more material being shot at a quicker pace).

Over all this time, not a week went by without my hearing "when's the nap item?" at least once. Shooting television (even soaps, which are shot relatively quickly) is a long, slow process, and who wouldn't want a nap during that stretch of the afternoon when the post-lunch slump has hit, and you know you still have hours to go?

There never was a nap item (okay, nobody REALLY expected there would be). So, perhaps sometimes now, I am making up for all those years of "no nap item days." Today, after a week of running, and no particular ideas about where to go, I took that nap--and got one of my kids to do it too. Who knows whether it will replace sleep at night, but it gave us the little refresher that we needed to go on with our day.

It's unlikely that any television production--or any business in the US, for that matter--will institute a "nap item." There's just always too much to be done, and too little time as it is. In life, however, we would all do well to write in that "nap item" from time to time. The rest of the items will still get done. They might just get done a little better.