Sara Schrager had an epiphany one summer during college break that set the course of her life and career. It was, without putting too fine a point on it, as if a light went off in her head. “I discovered stage lighting,” she said.
At the time, Schrager was attending Connecticut College in New London, first pursuing a degree in economics before she found it “too boring,” then a degree in history. But “while I was in school, I got very involved with modern dance,” she said. She had no aspirations of becoming a professional dancer, but was interested enough to be part of a summer dance festival staged by professional companies from New York that would come to Connecticut ”“ complete with professional stage lighting to add drama to the dance.
“It was wonderful,” she said of the complexity of stage lighting. “It was artistic, and required a technical ability,” she said simply of her sudden fascination with lighting. “The following summer I went back to the festival on the stage crew,” studying under Jennifer Tipton, a well-known Broadway and ballet lighting designer. By the time she graduated, “I knew I wanted to do lighting,” she said. “It was a calling, so to speak. I felt very fortunate because a lot of my classmates didn”™t know what they wanted to do.”
Tipton told Schrager that “if this is what you want to do, go to New York, give up the idea of security and go to work.” But it was the mid-”˜70s and women”™s lib, Schrager said, was providing “lots of opportunities for women in nontraditional fields, including stage electrician.” She plugged things in, ran dimmer boards, focused lights and climbed ladders. “One of my greatest jobs was being one of the original electricians on ”˜A Chorus Line,”™” she said. “It was a very exciting time.”
Disney-bound
But careers sometimes have a way of coming in and out of focus. One day Schrager was doing maintenance work, coiling cable with a colleague who told her about “this whole field called architectural lighting,” she said. “I followed up because, well, because economically, stage lighting was an incredibly hard way to make a living. You needed to be independently wealthy.”
Schrager took a class in architectural lighting design and began working for lighting-design architects in Manhattan. “When I was 28, I saw an ad in a trade magazine that Disney was looking for a lighting designer with theatrical and/or architectural lighting experience. ”˜That”™s my job,”™ I thought. How many people have experience in both?” She applied for the position “and nothing happened,” despite her follow-ups.?At the time she was freelancing for architectural lighting designers who were working on corporate and industrial shows when, nine months after applying for the Disney job, “out of the blue I got a call from Disney,” she said. Disney officials were in New York and wanted to know if she was still interested in the position. “They hired me on the spot and two weeks later I was in Glendale (Calif.). The project was the Epcot Center back when they were planning it for Disney World in Florida.”
She stayed at Disney for a year, but then left the company and moved back to New York because “I had been dating someone cross-country, but he had a young daughter and could not move to California,” she said.
After her marriage, she worked for a lighting designer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 18 years before he started his own firm. “I worked for him for a while until he couldn”™t afford to keep me,” she said. “He was a good designer, but not a good business guy. But that got me into doing museum lighting. I do a lot of that.” That list of museums includes the Jewish Museum in New York City, the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y., and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield.
Energy savings
In 1993 Schrager and her husband moved out of Manhattan to Ridgefield. “When I was in my 20s and 30s, I loved New York and got off on the energy,” she said. “After 40 or so, it”™s kind of wearing. And it”™s not real easy in New York with kids.”
Almost as soon as she moved to Connecticut, some New York friends called her with a job offer. They were working on an energy-management project for Columbia University. Was she interested? “They needed a lighting designer to help them figure out how to make the university more energy efficient, so I began commuting back to my old neighborhood.”
That assignment eventually blossomed into one of Schrager”™s strong points ”“ designing energy-saving lighting for architects working on everything from residences to churches to museums to corporate board rooms. The work is “a bit of a frustration,” she said. “The architect is given a building budget, but the owner can be penny-wise and pound-foolish by considering only the capital costs. Many times you have to spend more money up front with energy-efficient products, but the reduced energy costs will pay for the extra investment over time.”
Building owners are also a bit shy about the changing face of energy-efficient products.
“Fifteen years ago we heard that fiber optics would replace everything, but it wasn”™t as good as was promised,” she said. “Now, we hear the LEDs will replace fiber optics.”
Even homeowners are a bit reluctant to take the plunge. “People seem resistant to paying more for fluorescent lights, but they”™ll save money that way,” she said. “Fluorescents usually have a three-year payback.”
Schrager is currently doing a technical project for the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York “using LEDs as opposed to other types of light sources in the surgical MRI room,” she said. “Fluorescent lights can”™t be used in an MRI room, and halogen or incandescent lights have to be converted to direct current in order to use them, so we”™re trying LEDs.”
Schrager”™s lighting firm ”“ 10 years ago she formed Warfel Schrager Architectural Lighting with Bill Warfel of New Haven, who retired from the firm last month ”“ is also finding a niche in ecclesiastical spaces, including St. Luke”™s Church in Westport and the Calvary Independent Baptist Church in Redding. But “architects are our primary clients, both residential and commercial,” with an 80-20 mix of commercial to residential, she said. But “in terms of my business, this whole energy sustainable thing is very important. Many people seem to be much more interested now. The power companies have been trying to get people to do that for 10 or 15 years, but with the cost of energy, it”™s much more on the front burner.”
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