It was a clear Hawaiian night, and it was possible to walk up to the very edge of an active lava flow on the slopes of Kilauea—the blood of the earth exposed to the air, its intense heat briefly glowing then rapidly cooling to become dark stone. People would ask me, “How close can you get?” My response was always, “How far can you put your head into an oven?” Watching people transfixed by the light in the dark, it dawned on me that all life is drawn to light and the whole world would want to see a show about that. That thought was a pivotal moment in my history.
A few years earlier, I had quit a 15-year career as a highly successful stage performer. I had pioneered a genre, becoming the first comedy talking juggler in the history of Las Vegas. A video of me can still be found on YouTube, doing my shtick on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert in 1977. I appeared on national TV in the U.S. and across Europe, performed with ballet companies and orchestras, headlined comedy clubs, filling every bucket available for a juggler. You are only as old as your act—and I didn’t want to grow old doing my act—so I left my career, society, and civilization. I ended up in the jungles of the Big Island in Hawaii, where I built and lived in a treehouse without electricity for five years.
After the glaring lights of LA and Las Vegas, the darkness of night was soothing to my soul. It was on these Hawaiian nights, the stars sweeping overhead from one horizon to the other, that I felt connected to something more eternal than my name on a marquee for a week. It was in this darkness, my face hot from the lava, that a seed was planted for the sapling of a new idea. The tree I had been living in had served its purpose, and it was time for me to come down out of it.
I returned to civilization and the performing arts to raise awareness of the loss of our night skies due to light pollution. Entertainment spreads faster and is consumed more enthusiastically than educational programs and with this in mind, I created a show that was performed in a darkened theater, with unseen performers creating moving tapestries of light and color. My goal was to create the same sense of wonder I felt when looking at a night sky.
My brainchild, LUMA: Theater of Light and Art in Darkness, performed across generations and around the world. In 1987, light pollution was a fringe topic that was not on peoples’ radar. Thirty-plus years later, light pollution has become a driver in the travel market. It is time for those who still live under a starry night sky to learn how to capture the imagination of travelers, lovers of the night, and what we now call, astrotourists.
My journey has come full circle, and rather than inviting people into a theater, this book is an invitation to journey out into the evening’s shadow to experience the awe, amazement, and majesty that is everybody’s birthright: a view of the heavens. A dark sky is a free resource that needs little to capitalize on. If you are a tour guide, hotelier, outfitter, resort manager, or anyone whose place of business or residence can be found under a dark sky—and you do not take advantage—then, “The fault….lies not within the stars, but in ourselves.”