A few nights ago somebody posted an offer on my school’s student email list. Whoever answers first would get two free tickets to a fantasy show at the Laser Dome. The catch was that the tickets expire March 31st, but they could be used for any night. I replied to the email at 7 AM next morning and I was still the first. We arranged that the student would leave the tickets in an envelope at his workplace at one of the information desks of UW’s library. And indeed they were there when I went to pick them up.My wife picked me up at school around 6.40 PM. We went to Broadway and had a nice, albeit somewhat harried dinner under the watchful eyes of the Katmandu goddess (or at least her manifestation in the form of a young girl) at a Nepalese restaurant posing as an Indian one. We managed to leave the eatery at 7.35, which should have left us just enough time to get to the Laser Dome, which is part of the Pacific Science Center (where we saw the dead Sea Scrolls exhibition.) Anya was driving, so I could figure out the directions. She was doing great, I on the other hand not really. My attempt of reading the map correctly failed. I blame it on the poor coordination between the map and Seattle itself: the streets were not going the correct direction. When we had to go straight there was no road that direction, when we had to turn left onto a street, we were allowed to run right only, when we were going straight the road decided to turn itself into a ramp to the freeway.
After circling in the city for 15 minutes my mood was gone, I gave up. I thought we would never make it on time. The show was to start at 8 PM. I knew that the ushers are not supposed to let you in for this kind of show after it starts. But we got there 4 minutes before 8 PM. We found a parking lot with plenty of free space. After I mumbled for another minute with the meter (we were supposed to pay 4 dollars; first I tried to feed a fiver; then I realized it accepted only one-dollar bills) we approached the building. From the wrong direction. So we had to go around it. We were almost running at this point. But we got to the entrance 3 minutes after 8. Luckily there was a line outside. It meant we were not late. We waited a few for minutes (while Anya exchanged the coupons we had for proper tickets, which otherwise would have cost 8 dollars a piece) then got in.
The show lasted about an hour. It was mostly fun. It started off with the most popular Beatles songs, which made us think that the more psychedelic numbers will be missing from the show. We were wrong, they just came later. They played in the range of 25-22 songs. I learned a new word at the startup: laserist. That was the Ron’s occupation, the person who created the show live for us. He encouraged us to display our approval when we like something. We and the other 40-50 people in the audience (less than third house) did so.
Three things bothered me. A woman probably made about 40-50 pictures with flash during the show. Every time she shot one it hurt my eyes. I had a hard time resisting the urge to walk over to her and explain that because of the flash all her images will be useless, she’ll get the white inner walls of the dome only. But I managed not to make a scene. Also the chairs were rather uncomfortable. Next morning I walk up with some pain in my neck. I kept shifting my position, but never found a good one. Some people in the line were holding pillows. It turned out the middle of the room had no chairs and they could just lie down and watch the show from horizontal position. I am sure they had much better time then we did. Finally in the second half of the show the smog machine was on quite often. The laser made great effects on them, but my nose and lungs did not have to like what my eyes did. These effects made me think of the futuristic concert scene of Breaking Glass, where the singer was playing with her hands and body with similar straight laser lines in a smoky venue.
Now that the negative aspects are out of the way I can honestly say I had a good time. The laser show was fun. The abstract segments evoked all sorts of associations in me. It reminded me of the first drawings I tried to make on my Commodore 86 using mathematics. They were black and white and mostly static, unless you count it as animation how the slow computer drew them line by line. But they were similar to these fast moving and colorful plethora of images. A lot of the motifs were reminiscent of the image that I am familiar with from the Meru Foundations’ work on Hebrew alphabet. Here is the 2D representation of their three+ dimensional theory.
Several stories were also shown, including one base on the Yellow submarine, another one for the “I am the egg-man” theme. But my favorite one was about an owl that befriends a worm, plants flowers and eventually learns to fly as she helps other little birds. The closing song was “Happy birthday”, with cartoon characters dancing and spanking each other. (Incidentally this is how I had to learn the tradition of getting spanked on one’s b-day as many times as many years s/he reached. How barbarous. Think of those poor fragile centenarians.)
That wraps up my memories of the good evening. I don’t remember much, because I practically fall asleep in the car on the way home. Fortunately it was not me who was driving. I suspect I might have dozed off during the show for a few seconds too.