John Nadon:  

Life After graduating from Burroughs and the Theater Arts Department I managed to get accepted at the Performing Arts Center Theater at Alan Hancock College in Santa Maria, CA. I was fortunate to get a assistant design assignment to pay for my training. While there I learned from Director Donovan Marley (who later made the Denver Performing Arts Center so successful) and designers Barbara Sellers and Robert Blackman (the costume designer for the updated Star Trek series). I also got to work with Boyd Gaines and Harry Groener who later earned Broadway Tony awards. I graduated and was given a design position at Santa Rosa Junior College. Later I took a resident designer position teaching lighting, scenery and costume design at Valley State Colleges in Allendale, MI, as well as working as an independent stage designer. I joined friends in a start-up company called Litelab, starting the business on the west coast, then moving to New York City. This was a disco lighting company - which was just luck. The company did the dance floor and disco for Saturday Night Fever, followed over the next ten years by my design team doing over 250 night clubs, winning design awards in the U.S., Europe, South America, and Asia. We then started getting requests to do restaurants and stores and hotels and became an architectural lighting company. With this came magazine and newspaper articles, TV shows and some more film work. The second best thing was having Dick DeBartolo at MAD Magazine include us in one of his stories after I put a disco in his boat on the Hudson River. The best thing was meeting my wife. I hired her to translate meetings with the Lido de Paris. It only took about five years to get her to figure out I wasn't crazy (well, crazy about her - yes). Changes happen and the partners at Litelab split - with me accepting an offer to develop business designing custom lighting fixtures for Lightolier. I learned marketing from the senior management there, eventua...Expand for more