My, how times change when you grow up! Today, I design lighting for all kinds of things, ranging from restaurants to Broadway shows, with anywhere from a dozen lights to many hundreds. After all, every day was new, and nobody ever asked me to repeat the show I did back in January.
Of course, with only twelve sockets, a limited supply of bulbs, and only one performance of each “show”, I didn’t bother to write down what I was doing. By taking out most of the bulbs and putting in a white one and wrapping it in a bit of cardboard, I even made the center of the stage “special”. With 12 sockets and three switches, I could do what seemed at the time to be magic: Make everything blue, or red, or green, or magenta, or sort of yellowy or underwatery. As a kid, my father built me a hand-puppet stage and equipped it with three circuits of colored light bulbs, resulting in my first experiences with puppets, lights, switches, and color. So there you have it: John McKernon’s Dictionary of Lighting.
Lighting Paperwork: The only way to retain your sanity while doing lighting, with possible side effects including mental confusion and writer’s cramp or carpal tunnel syndrome. Lighting: A generally fun thing that can influence moods and make people and places look better (or worse) and which generally involves a lot of hard (but rewarding) work to do as well. Commonly manifested in long lines at the DMV, tax return instructions crammed with hundreds of rules in tiny type, and endless hours spent hunched over piles of paper or a hot computer.
Paperwork: Record keeping intended to keep track of everything.
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