BLACKWIDOWBLACKWIDOWBLACKWIDOW!!!!

A few years ago, I was working in a theater in middle America. I use the term "theater" loosely here - it was a barn that had been converted. Poorly. It still had the architecture of a barn, but now had a stage shoved in the middle of it, some seats, and wires. It was still a very flimsy, very flammable, very wooden building. While working in this theater, most of the crew was living on campus at a local university, so the vast majority of us lived in the same small, two story dormitory.

I was working on the lighting crew. One day I was cleaning lighting instruments with our master electrician, who came from the deep south. Theater lighting instruments are pretty large and generally quite heavy. In addition to the normal elements you would find in a light, theatrical lighting instruments have steel shutters that you can adjust to alter the size and shape of the beam. After spending a year in a closet in a wooden barn, these instruments were quite rusted, so the Master Electrician, who I will call Mark, and I were scrubbing the steel shutters with rubbing alcohol and steel wool. Mark went into the closet to get another instrument and I suddenly heard him screaming. Like a little girl. I jumped up and ran to him, fearing something had collapsed on him. I arrived to find Mark pointing at the ground, still screaming.

"Mark?! What's going on?!"

"BLACKWIDOWBLACKWIDOWBLACKWIDOWBLACKWIDOW!"

"Mark, that's not a black widow. It's just a little house spider."

"IT'S A BLACK WIDOW!"

"Okay, Mark, calm down. I'll kill it."

So I go to step on this tiny little common spider. Now, I thought Mark had already lost his shit completely, but he got worse. "Roz! No! Oh my God! Nonononononononononono! What are you doing?!"

"I'm going to kill it for you. It'll be fine."

"It's not going to be fine! You're going to step on it, it's going to hide in the treads of your shoes, it's going to come back to the dorms, it's going to get in my room, and it's going to kill me!" (Note: I lived on the top floor, at the far east of the building. Mark lived downstairs on the far west.)

Before I can explain to Mark why this is stupid, I see the dumb son of a bitch, our master electrician, grab a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and start shaking the bottle, trying to splash rubbing alcohol onto the spider. Then he takes his motherfucking lighter out of his pocket. So I tackle him. "Mark, you fucking idiot! We're in a barn! Don't set anything on fire!"

He starts weeping and shrieking about the black widow and I pry the bottle of rubbing alcohol out of his hand and smash the spider with it, grinding it a little bit. I can see the spider's legs have detached. Mark is still shrieking as I lift the bottle to reveal bits of spider exoskeleton falling from the bottom of the bottle. Bitch is clearly dead and all sorts of torn apart. At this point Mark begins screaming about the bottle of alcohol being contaminated and what if the "black widow" secreted poison onto the bottle and whine whine scream scream. I threw the bottle away.

And people wonder why I chose not to work in theater for the rest of my life...