Swirling rain showers and freakish thunderstorms had wreaked havoc on the Windy City for the past several days. But at precisely 8:27 p.m. on October 6, an angry dark cloud that had been trailing me for more than a year was lifted away to reveal a sparklingly clear nighttime sky. The relief was so palpable as to border on ecstasy, yet I was clear-headed, the night was young, and I hadn’t yet gone anywhere near the bar.
The site was the old but spectacular dome-topped brick rotunda at the end of Chicago’s Navy Pier, now known as the Grand Ballroom. We’d just wrapped a black-tie, multimedia gala there, where the 58 winners of this year’s World PRO Awards were announced and presented with beautiful crystal trophies in recognition of the excellence of their work.
The staging had been superb, the pace brisk, the sound and acoustics terrific, the audio-visual brilliant, the lighting magnificent, and the speeches mercifully short. What more could anyone ask for? I heaved a sigh of relief. We had a success on our hands.
Nearly 500 friends, colleagues, and acquaintances had come from all over the world; some to receive their trophies, others to watch them being received. But it was over now, and they milled about, savoring the moment, basking in an ocean of professional pride. The band struck up an Argentine tune in honor of the winner of the Best Promotion in the World. As I walked away from the stage, I couldn’t resist looking up: The cloud was gone.
I flashed back to the fall of last year and a site about a dozen blocks west – to Planet Hollywood, to be exact, where I experienced the single most spectacular pratfall of my long and checkered career. Not in the company of a few close friends, mind you, but right smack in front of about 350 people. Including family, friends and colleagues whose respect I value greatly.
Talk about miscalculaton! I’ll spare you the gory details, but what we thought would be a delightful departure from the mundane and the routine, turned out to be the most spectacularly disastrous, the most excruciatingly embarrassing, audio-visual meltdown in modern history.
To bad lighting, horrible acoustics, poor staging, and terrible visibility, add a complete sound and audio failure with no way of stopping the program and you get an idea of how it was.
The tough part is that the decision, as wrong as it turned out to be, had been mine and mine alone. The failed recipe: Take overcrowding, add a computer-driven video that couldn’t be stopped 10 minutes into the program, stir with a heavy dose of uncontrollable crowd noise, and you’ve got a cake that’s not going to rise. Had there been a way to crawl under the tables to get to the back door (Oh, I looked.), I would have considered taking it.
One lesson to be learned, which I ignored in my zeal to try something new and different: Whether it’s an event, a project, or a campaign, experiment yes, but leave nothing to chance. Who knows: If the audio hadn’t failed, the novelty and excitement of staging an awards program at a nightclub might well have worked, but it was a gamble and I lost.
Another is to never take success for granted. To do so is to exhibit what the ancient Greeks called hubris. Show a bit too much and you’re going to get slapped down sooner or later. This year I left absolutely nothing to chance, assuming right up to the last minute that if anything could go wrong, it would. Which is why it didn’t and this year s success was so sweet.
It’s also why I no longer snicker at glitches in other peoples A-V presentations. I don t want to see that cloud come back.
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