[SML] A very special birthday

Richard Niederberg ladesigners at gmail.com
Wed Mar 17 19:56:28 UTC 2021


Kinda like the bulb in the Fire Station that has burned for 100+ years?
/s/ Richard

On Wed, Mar 17, 2021 at 12:43 PM Jeff Forbes via Stagecraft <
stagecraft at theatrical.net> wrote:

> Greetings listers:)
> I’m actually celebrating two anniversaries almost back to back here, but
> it’s the second one that inspired this post.
> Back in 2000 my wife and I (using her money from selling her apartment in
> NYC) bought a small rather plain looking church in Portland Oregon which we
> turned in to a dance studio and small performance venue and founded a
> non-profit arts organization.. That is the first anniversary, and we
> celebrated out 20th year mostly in lockdown due to the thing. But that’s
> not the birthday I’m thinking about today.
> Sometime in Spring 2001 a friend of mine in the performance community here
> told me of some used lighting gear that was going up for sale in her
> neighborhood. It seems there was an elderly retired gentleman who lived on
> her block who used to be a stage hand or electrician at Portland Civic
> Theater. ( I never figured out if this was the Portland Civic Theatre that
> was a community theater here for many years, or the building that is now
> the Keller Auditorium, previously the Portland Civic Auditorium, and the
> Portland Civic Theatre before that.) He was quite elderly and lived alone
> and had a bunch of lighting equipment in his basement among other things.
> Recently some young thugs had broken into his house while he was there,
> beaten him up and robbed him, and his family had decided it was time to
> move to an assisted living facility and not live alone anymore. They were
> also selling the house and all of its contents.
> I wound up picking up some 6” fresnels as the beginnings of a lighting rig
> for our studio. These were old Century fresnels, in their original boxes.
> They say “Century Lighting Inc. 419 West 55th Street, New York N.Y.” on the
> box.
> Now these fresnels also came with lamps, 500w incandescent T20 medium
> pre-focus. These fresnels put out a very n ice even field and were pretty
> much in pristine condition. And after 20 years of moderate use I have yet
> to replace a lamp in any of them. Those suckers are still burning..
>
> Kinda reminds me of the story of Benny the Bulb in “Gravity’s Rainbow”,
> about an immortal light bulb that doesn’t burnout.
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-- 
/s/ Richard
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