Lighting Up The Dance Floor with Lighting Designer Marsha Stern

Lighting designer Marsha Stern discusses the finances of a freelance career starting in NYC nightclubs in the 1970s. Stern is interviewed by lighting designer Ethan Steimel on the podcast Artistic Finance. The weekly show answers common financial questions and provides a resource for artists to have their finance questions answered.

Stern moved to New York City in 1976 for a career in music: playing, composing, and producing. She got a job as a publicist at The Howard Bloom Organization, where she was introduced to disco and rock-and-roll clients. This led to a series of jobs, culminating with the Joe Long Sound, a production team. When that disbanded, she was offered $35 to work lights at a club in downtown New York City.

Stern became friends with many top Billboard-reporting DJs and lighting operators from her days in the music business, resulting in a job at New York, New York, a prominent club in midtown Manhattan that served as a rival to Studio 54. A friend, in charge of lighting, was leaving for a summer residency on Fire Island, said, "Marsha, you know the music. If you can figure out the controls, you've got a job." Thus began more than a decade of designing and operating lights for clubs.

Working in clubs, Stern was asked to look at lighting artistically, which is why her knowledge of music was important: "I was fortunate that I also had the technical capabilities to understand what was going on and how to do this. That's a whole other skill set. Just because you can flip a light switch doesn't mean you can wire a room." Since the pandemic, Stern has tapped back into the music side of her career. She inherited much of the archives of her friend, the famed DJ Roy Thode. Stern saved more than 100 reel-to-reel tapes of Thode's work, which she has been digitizing for more than the past 15 years. She discusses the music and New York City nightlife of the 1970s and 1980s on her podcast The Heartbeat of The Dance Floor. An upcoming episode will focus on lighting with Anne Militello, Paul Gregory, Jason Kantrowitz, Ken Billington.

A skiing accident blew out Stern's knee; with it went the ability to climb ladders and perform other technical tasks needed for nightclubs and special events. She transitioned to architecture in the mid-'90s, working with the firm Johnson Swinghammer on an installation at FAO Schwarz's new store, part of the expansion at Caesar's Forum Shops in Las Vegas. She introduced the architectural lighting designers to moving head lights, proposing various ways to use Vari-Lite units. For the previous ten years, she had been working with them at the downtown nightclub Palladium and in her special-events work. This knowledge was transferred to architecture applications. The transition into architecture eventually brought Stern a client list of her own, causing caused her to incorporate as Marsha Stern Lighting Design & Consulting, Inc. She did so primarily for liability protection; she continued to work as an independent designer, programmer, and consultant until 2017, when she joined Acclaim Lighting, the architectural division of ADJ Group. The corporation remains actively registered in New York State, although Stern hasn't used it for some years. She isn't actively seeking out lighting design work but anticipates jobs will come her way. When they do, they will require the structure of the corporation.

Responding to Steimel asking if the corporation helped with a retirement savings structure, Stern explains that it hasn't changed anything. When working nightclubs, she was often on the payroll of a venue. As such, a portion of her checks went to build her Social Security account, which she opted into during the pandemic. In the 1970s, while pursuing the music business, it was the same: a W-2 paycheck situation with taxes and FICA deducted automatically. Occasionally, clubs paid her entirely or partly in cash, none of which went toward Social Security or into a retirement account. Stern eventually started setting money aside from her 1099 paychecks, starting with CDs at her bank and eventually moving to stocks and bonds in brokerage accounts.

For Stern, 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic brought everything to a halt, including her tenure with ADJ Group. During the past two years, she has delved into passion projects, creating The Heartbeat of the Dance Floor as well as a legacy website dedicated to Thode. "I'm embracing what seems to be my third career as a nightlife historian, which combines my life experiences from both the musical and lighting/production world." These new projects are under the umbrella of Backlit Productions, LLC, which Stern formed in Florida in 2011 for her music-oriented ventures.

Several times, Stern mentions her wonderful and loving relationships with colleagues. "The entertainment business in general is made up of loving relationships that are probably more friendship than business sometimes. And sometimes those friendships are more business than friendships, which is why they are sustainable." Steimel observes Stern's energy and love of music, lighting, and her collaborators. Her energy is infectious and carries into a discussion about LDI. Stern and Steimel will both be in Las Vegas in November to record a live episode of Artistic Finance.

Watch the full interview here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFSmWk1_cUw&ab_channel=ArtisticFinance.

Learn more about Marsha Stern in the column "People Worth Knowing," featured in Lighting&Sound America's October 2016 issue.