Of course, the “Rear Window” thing was more controversial; lots of people though it was kind of weird, and a bit unsettling, that I spied on neighbors with a telescope, until I sat them down, pointed in a place I thought might interest them, and it then inevitably took me an hour to peel them off the steamy glass.  Soon, my roommate and I were always expected to offer turns at the telescope when we had people over, and as time passed, it was disturbingly often I kept running into people I “knew” on the street.

All well and good so far, but the boring thing about voyeurism, eventually, is that it’s just not interactive, and worse, people tend to turn off the lights just when things get really interesting.  Fortunately, at the time I worked for a theatrical lighting company, and a solution was at hand….  Why not rent a followspot, of the sort that encircles ballerinas and rock stars, and bring it home to put some light on the subject?  Naturally, I wanted one of our Super Troupers, not just since they were the title of an Abba song, but also because they were the biggest followspots on earth, and I had a whole city to cover, after all.  Sadly, even with my employee discount, the rental was a tad prohibitive, and even though I was more than willing to unplug my stove to power it, I wasn’t skilled enough at manipulating a carbon arc to be sure it would work, even if one of the huge things would fit in the elevator…

For my first trial I settled on a “Trouperette,” a relatively small, workhorse favorite of evangelical churches and high schools, whose golf-bag size wouldn’t expose me to undue notoriety on the elevator, and only needed 10 amps, yet worrying all the while it would be too wimpy to make much of a stir.  (It also had the advantage of running on a standard 1000 watt halogen lamp, didn’t need a sober person to operate, and if one was free, I could have it all weekend for twenty bucks.)  We waited, eagerly,  for the dark.  At dusk I fired it up, and danged if it didn’t put a huge disk of light on the side of the Hilton Hotel, across the park and some seven blocks north, and I was delighted to realize I could now put full daylight into any room I wanted to, and in white, lavender, blue, peach, or rose, to boot.

The best thing, though, was the way people reacted to being spotlighted; with a few disappointing exceptions, they all loved it and thought they were, 20 years early, on American Idol.  One girl danced a soft shoe in the park below and bowed afterward, and some hot teenage culinary school students a few blocks away ended up coming over, but the gales of laughter from everyone, coupled with the complete anonymity of it all, led me to look into buying my own Trouperette.  This thing, and the telescope to go with it, was more fun than naked Twister.

Sadly, management had, understandably, been informed of our antics, and mere moments after we fired her up for a last hurrah on Sunday evening, we quickly received a rather unambiguous and discouraging visit from the manager, who seemed to take an ignorantly dim view of the whole thing, and therefore promised increased scrutiny of any large lighting equipment that came in or out.  The jig was, evidently, up.

That was over 20 years ago…  And although I’m back in the same building, I bet they’ve forgotten.  Time to go on Craigslist and look up “Trouperette,” with VISA card at the ready.