So I light this fashion Gala every year. It's a big show with various theme segments and entertainment mixed with good old fashioned runway modeling. But this year I had the extra pleasure of lighting a professional stripper doing her burlesque act.
A woman named Dita Von Teese was to be the last act on stage for this gala event. She books herself out as a good old fashioned burlesque act. Over a ten minute routine she would strip out of her attire while walking the runway with her two French maid clad assistants. Her act culminated with her taking a bubble bath in a large champagne glass.
I had a hundred or so moving lites and 4 spotlites so I thought it would be pretty easy to light her act. Until the great pink controversy of 2007 arose. It seems our favorite stripper cannot be lit in anything other than a pure pink. Of course one would think of a broadway or follies pink for this act. So I did that. But after the opening night there was big trouble in River City.The stage simply was not pink enough. Now the act needed to go through each light fixture to pick the proper pink for their performance.
As it turns out, the version of pink the artist really wanted out of the moving lights is what the rest of us call magenta. She assured me I had been mistaken for 30 years and that magenta is really pink, and that what I thought was pink is really an off white color. OK, I say. It's your 10 minutes of fame, I can live with labeling my magenta color pallette "pink".
So now I go to the spot lites. Of course they are brighter than the moving lights, so their "pink" color frames are just too white for our gal. So out come the techs with 4 different frames of assorted pink color. Now I've got the TD, the show director and the producer of the event choosing the proper pink to spot our performer in. We settle on a double cut of Lee 111. Pure pink double saturated.
So now I have 50 wash lites bathing the runway in magenta. I have 40 hard edge lights throwing soft patterns of dark pink on top of that. I ask the spots to hit our artist upon her entrance and they try their best. But of course they are now shooting a dark pink light into a sea of pinkness. How they found their intended target I'll never know. I'm not really convinced they ever hit her in fact. Who could tell? I guess she could because I never heard another complaint.
