Every year I say I'm turning in early, and every year I turn out to be a liar. The usual Friday night party circuit seemed especially busy last night, and especially boisterous. It all started early for us, as we held a cocktail reception at our booth to offically launch Live Design. The booth was packed with friends, well-wishers, and a wide array of industry types: Luc LaFortune and Nol Van Genuchten, Michael Tait and Winky Fairorth of Tait Towers, legendary tour manager Jake Berry, Peter Wynne Wilson, Seth Jackson, Clifton Taylor, Dawn Beveridge from d&b, Rob Halliday, Vari-Lite's Bryan Matthews, Rachel Scharff from Scharff Weisberg, Bob Daggers from American Harlequin, and many, many more whose names I am forgetting at the moment (oh where for art thou, lost brain cells). We ate, we drank, we schmoozed. And I managed to make a suitable fool of myself on the mic, and not with my mad rap skills.
That party ended as the show closed at six, and a whole contingent of the Live Design staff and others made our way to the Genlyte/Var-Lite/ET party at the Rosen Centre, where I managed to spill Marian Sandberg's glass of wine all over her lemon yellow suit, which she managed to turn into a topic of conversation all night long. It was a great crowd, featuring not only Bob Schacherl, George Masek, Heinz Roy, Alan Keene and the rest of the Genlyte posse but an assortment of designers and programmers, including old friend Marsha Stern.
From there we stumbled down to the poolside Rose Brand party, which was packed as usual, and then, despite my best intentions of retiring for the night, I found myself heading over to this club Glo, which was a launch party for yet another new magazine by the folks at Total Production US. Bruce Jordahl and Robert Mokry led a band that rocked the house, and from there it all becomes a bit of a blur I'm afraid. I believe we all had fun, and no one seems to have suffered serious bodily image, and so here we are Saturday morning on the show floor, ready to go at it again another day, and I'm sure another night.