Saturday nights are so much better than Fridays.  Nothing against Latin Night, it’s just not my kind of music.  The crowds are great, the people are great, but sometimes I get paranoid that I’m the only one there who speaks English.  And really, it’s easy money, so I’m not complaining.

Saturdays are a lot more fun.  DJ Smooth and myself upstairs, DJ Herk downstairs, and Ill Cosby in The District.  The District has the best soundtrack, but the second floor booth has the most fun.

A few months ago, I took apart every fixture upstairs.  All 15 MX-4s, 4 MAC-250s, and I even re-hung the third Atomic 3000 strobe that’s been “hidden” in the downstairs booth for a few years.  The difference has been nothing short of spectacular.  In an earlier post, I talked about how halogen lamps “yellow out” as they get older and their color temperature drifts.  That was happening very badly at Dragonfly.  “White” produced a pale yellow/gold, “Blue” would give me a blue-green algae-like tint.  Yellow was fairly accurate.

First, I dusted the MX-4s.  Having been the LAST person to clean them, I wasn’t at all surprised to find 12 months worth of NightclubDust ™ slathered all over every available surface inside and outside the plastic casing.  NightclubDust ™ is not your ordinary household dust.  NightclubDust ™ is household dust x 500 people, plus a generous amount of fog, ionized cigarette smoke particles, carbon, a smidge of rust, and a sprinkle of plastic shavings.  Due to the intense heat generated by the 150-watt discharge lamps inside each unit, all of those elements are fused into a spongy matter with the texture of cotton candy mixed with sour cream and lichen.

Once the NightclubDust ™ gets removed, the outer lens comes out and gets soaked in rubbing alcohol, as per the Martin cleaning instructions.  It’s then given a bath in distilled water, and carefully reseated with gloved hands (fingerprints are the enemy).  The interior lens is ridiculously difficult to pull out, so it got an alcohol wipe, followed by a blast of distilled water, followed by about a minute of compressed air.  The color wheel got the same treatment, and the gobo wheel (a single piece of stamped steel) got wiped down with a dry cloth.  The entire process?  About 30 minutes per fixture.  8 hours of my day gone by - time to start the MACs.

The pictures you see at the bottom are all from the MAC-250s.  They were beyond filthy, and took a lot more effort to clean.  We wound up taking these off the ceiling for two reasons.  First, these puppies are a lot more complex, and have removable EVERYTHING.  I didn’t want a color lens or gobo making the 16-foot journey from ceiling to floor.  Second, I wanted to realign the units so that their “home” positions were all facing the same way.  This is how most installations are; I have no idea why Dragonfly was any different.

The MACs each have four lenses, and as with the MX4s, the inner lens got the alcohol wipe.  The outer three all got baths.  In addition, each gobo is removable, so they all got a hardcore cleaning (alcohol for the glass gobos, air for the metal ones).  Finally, there’s a complex mechanical tracking mechanism in the base that was FULL — literally, every square inch was occupied — of NightclubDust ™.  I have no idea how they worked at all, but cleaning them out finally got rid of all the error messages that used to populate the onboard LED status display / control panel.  Perfect.

Then I re-hung the third strobe.  It hadn’t been used in a few years, so it was SUBSTANTIALLY brighter than the existing two.  It’s hung in its original position, facing the DJ booth, so I now sympathize with those of you who complain that the strobes are too bright (sorry Martha, sorry Kenda).

A little reprogramming, and the show is, quite literally, good as new.  The lights are back to their full brightness (at least 1/8th inch of gunk came off of each side of each lens), the color temperature is MUCH better (for being 3.5 years old, the bulbs barely have any tinge at all), and everything is tracking correctly again.  Music aside, it’s like April 2002 all over again.

So now it’s 6:41pm, I’m at my job (managing away), and I’ve got just over 3 hours until tonight’s party begins.  Around 10-10:30, Dragonfly gets overrun with bachelorette parties, which necessitates You Can Do It and the like.  Some nights that holds until midnight, other nights we’re packed at 11, but when the pillars go dark the fun begins.

Come to Dragonfly tonight, Saturday 10/22/05.  Print out this page and bring a copy of it with you, and you’ll get in free before midnight.  Bring up to five friends and they’re in on the house too.  Just mention you read it on floor-9.chilled and you’re golden.  I’ll technically be “working” in the booth, so I won’t be able to hang out or do anything cool, so just consider this my way of saying thanks for the 2000+ unique visits I pull in every month these days.