On 12/11/2013 9:47 AM, Mike Marlow wrote:
Leon wrote:
http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs...ries.html?vp=1

As was stated by one of the people who left a comment on the Youtube site -
it takes me back to our younger years. We couldn't afford to buy cool
things so we had to improvise and build stuff that we were interested in.

[what follows is something I posted on a piano-related group, but I
think it fits nicely here.]

In what seems like a short time my parents have gone from being
completely independent at an advanced age to needing a lot of help. I
bring them dinner four or five nights a week. It's as much about the
visit as it is the dinner. I told them a story tonight; They seem to
enjoy that, so I do it a lot these days.

When I was twelve or thirteen my friends Danny and Vinny got it in their
heads that we should form a band. Danny had had a handful of guitar
lessons and Vinny had a set of drums with cardboard heads.

We all lived on the same block. Danny was the newcomer, having moved in
when we were six years old. Vinny, as best I could tell, had sprung
directly from the ground under his parents' house.

There are a great many stories that I could tell about that fledgling
band experience, but tonight's offering was about the "Professional
Four-Color Stage Lighting".

I should add here that this was a very different era. We were in each
other's houses all the time. No prior arrangements were needed. Whoever
was in the house at mealtime was served and whatever set of adults were
about were your parents; to be obeyed to exactly the same degree as the
pair that lived in your house. So when I told this story I didn't need
to add in any character development for my parents; Danny, who figures
prominently, was closer to being a relative than a neighbor.

Although the band would eventually play a number of paying gigs, at this
stage we were limited to our own basements. We'd occasionally announce a
private show for the neighborhood kids, usually in Danny's house.

We decided that something was lacking. Clearly it wasn't talent; we were
every bit as good as twelve-year-olds in a basement could hope to be.
But the presentation was less than it could be. We decided we needed
Professional Stage Lights.

Of course, this was also an era in which asking our "Parents'
Collective" to buy us Professional Stage Lights would have met with - at
best - a bemused stare. Luckily each of our houses came complete with a
garage full of odd leftovers from household projects.

After some rooting around, we had all of the components you need for
Professional Stage Lighting: eight ceramic light sockets with exposed
screw terminals, two electrical boxes, a roll of zip cord, some leftover
pieces of 60's era wood wall paneling, sundry outlets and switches,
eight colored light bulbs and, oh yeah, twenty feet of aluminum foil.

We somehow managed to cut the paneling into pieces about 8" x 40". This
must have been the only wood we could find, because it was no mean trick
to make a wedge-shaped half-box out of stuff this thin. If memory
serves, we held it together with little metal corner braces. We somehow
managed to cut triangular pieces of some other kind of wood to make the
end pieces.

[As I write this I wonder how we managed to make it to adulthood.]

Next came the aluminum foil. The bulbs we had were the of the standard
"bulb" shape, which would have squandered most of the light on the rest
of the room rather than the band. So we applied the foil, among the more
conductive materials known, to the inside surfaces of the wedge-boxes we
had made.

We then wired up the ceramic sockets, running a separate piece of wire
to each. We wanted to be able to turn the colors on and off separately.
We screwed the sockets to the boxes with the 3/8" long brackets they
came with.

In retrospect, against all odds we (and our guardian angels, I presume)
managed to wire that much up without creating any short-circuits. Danny
and I knew at least twice as much about electricity as the average
twelve-year-old, which might be impressive if the average
twelve-year-old knew anything at all. Our background consisted of the
fact that I had hooked a bulb up to a big chunky lantern battery for a
Science Fair project and Danny's Dad was a plumber.

Now we had to build the Professional Control Box. We screwed together
two double-gang electrical boxes and installed the four switches and the
four outlets. The air was thick with trepidation; we could see that
pretty soon we'd be plugging this whole mess into a wall outlet.

For reasons that I can't explain, we decided to route all of the wires
from the "switch" half of our Control Box to the "outlet" half through
one hole. And we didn't leave much slack. It took us an unreasonably
long time to get it all hooked up.

The moment of truth had arrived. We plugged our Control Box into the
wall. And ...

Another note about the Sixties. Our houses back then had only a few
circuits, and there was no logical system that determined what
appliances, lights and outlets would be served by each one, rather a
crazy-quilt of random devices spread around the house. And there were
fuses rather than circuit breakers. Blowing one meant finding and
unscrewing the bad one - possibly in the dark - and hoping you had a
replacement.

As the tines of the plug just entered the outlet there was a loud pop!
But for a brief flash of bluish light from inside the Control Box, we
were in the dark, . We were lucky that Danny's Dad was a plumber who had
taught his son how to change a fuse, and we were doubly lucky that he
and the rest of the family were not at home.

[My parents were chuckling at this point, but my Mom had a touch of
retroactive worry for the twelve-year-old me on her face]

Undaunted by this setback, and secure in the knowledge that Danny had
located two more spare fuses, we opened up the box and tinkered with it
some more. Time for another test.

The spark seemed a little more orange this time, but otherwise the
results were similar. Danny put in another spare fuse.

More surgery ensued. Would the third time be the charm?

By this point Danny had become quite expert at changing the fuse, but it
was the last one. I remember suggesting that perhaps we should call it a
day. There'd be hell to pay if Danny's parents came home to a 20%
non-functional house, and the shared-parent arrangement meant that I
wouldn't escape unscathed either.

Nevertheless, we gave it another try. This time the light came from the
bulbs, in all their Blue, Green, Yellow and Red glory, not to mention
every other permutation we could think of. We must have spent an hour
playing with the switches and seeing how cool we looked in the light.

Our next basement "concert" was pretty much the best thing ever. That
might also have been the first time we wore matching band outfits, but
that's another story.

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