I just got back from taking a cruise. I didn’t go for a relaxing vacation, mind you, I went to work. There’s a new trend now where bands are chartering these ships and creating a musical ride for a few days. This particular ride consisted of 2,500 diehard fans who boarded the vessel for four days of alcohol infused, music blaring, full-on debauchery. That is for the people who paid. For those of us who get paid to control the theatrical lighting on one of these floating tubs, it’s quite an exercise in futility. I believe the majority of these ships start out with some pretty sweet light rigs. Somewhere along the way they seem to go to hell in a bucket. The upkeep of these once-divine lighting systems is pretty non-existent. The bottom line seems to be that once the ships are out to sea and a show is programmed, nobody wants to dump a dime into maintaining fixtures…Out of 86 yoke lights, I have an even 60 that have light coming out of them. Mostly dim brown light. The VL3500 bulbs emit a beam the equivalent of a Maglite with a color changer on them. Out of 20 Cybers, I have 11 that even turn on but have broken color flags…After swapping six bulbs that were bad, I fire up these fixtures. There’s a reason these lights had bad bulbs. Each one had either a gobo or a color wheel stuck in it. Apparently they sometimes run short of bulbs, so they simply stole them from broken lights and put them in working fixtures that needed a lamp.
—Nook Schoenfeld, from “Floundering on a Sea Cruise,” PLSN, June 2011
