Talk about a fun event: poker, food, celebrities, DJs, and sexy women in NASCAR paraphernalia. BottleRocket Sports coordinated the event for TrackCouture, hosting a $100,000 dollar charity poker game and displaying the line of TrackCouture clothing who designs officially licensed NASCAR fan clothing for women. I was given one design guideline: pink, pink, pink.

The call for the job came only several days before the event, not giving me much time for planning. I immediately suggested a custom gobo for the TrackCouture logo for the spots and they sent the artwork within the hour. I had never been in the basement of the Charlotte bar “Cans” but I am accustomed to improvising. Sometimes knowing nothing is better than having everything change the day of the event.

Chris Hawkins and I run the services for Mosaic Church every Sunday. Arriving at Cans at the designated time of 2:30, we already worked an 8 hour day. No lighting was required for the poker room upstairs; only the rooms downstairs. The décor downstairs consists of open rafters, large wooden beams, and styles combining elements of brick and wood. I had assumed the basement would be in the same open style of the first floor. Momentarily stumped, I now had to light multiple rooms.

Three rooms without natural lighting locations* sent me back to the shop to pick up more pipe and base, and moving light stands. The rooms had plenty of power, accessible outlets, tall ceilings, and exposed pipe. The exposed pipe allowed us to easily hide nearly 500 ft of DMX cabling throughout the ceiling. The first room we used 2 moving washes to scan the ceiling splashing shades of pink and purple. The second room we used two moving head spot fixtures with the custom gobos scanning the long metal air conditioning vent. The 2 spots ventured through the open passageways between the rooms and even up the open stair case splashing the entrance with light. The gobos were slowly rotating and prismed, alternating between pink and blue which happen to be adjacent.

In the last room , New York bred, DJ Jus SKE from Allido Records (www.allidorecords.com) spun all night after flying in from spinning Mariah Carey’s VIP party the night before, who ended up DJing a solid set from 7 till nearly 3 in the morning. We took four LED pars to light the DJ and backwashed the wall with two H20s all on pink. I used two 5 feet stands and placed the scanners on top tilting them in 45 degrees towards the DJ. Underneath the top of the stand I mounted two 12 inch mirror balls easily lit with the scanners. Above the bar 3 mannequins were placed without any natural room lighting, so we mounted 3 pink led cans directly in front of each torso. Most of the evening I combined three of my favorite colors on the dance floor: Blue, Yellow, and Pink. I had one scanner on the mirror ball about 50 percent of the time, filling the room with a little 80s mirror ball magic. The party stretched from 7 pm to 11 pm to 12 pm to 1 am to nearly 3 a.m. Everyone was having so much fun the host decided to stretch out the evening.

By the end of my 21 hour day, I had an ecstatic client extremely happy with their event. TrackCouture (www.TrackCouture.com) and BottleRocket Sports (www.BottleRocketSports.com), overwhelmed with the success of their evening, thanked me as I began packing the equipment. I politely smiled wondering which charity was awarded the $100,000. Moving into automatic, we broke down and packed the rig to go home and dream of the pink ladies of NASCAR.

Contact Jack Kelly at www.EyeDialogue.com

*The tops of speakers, truss, pipes, large coves, etc.