SHINING LIVES

  Shining Lives - I had no idea that the numbers on  clocks, pocket watches and wrist watches were hand painted in the 1920s. In the case of the Westclox Company, they used dials that were painted by young women who worked for the Radium Dial Company in Illinois. The job was to use a small paint brush, smooth it to a point between their lips, dip it into the radium powder and carefully paint perfect numbers on the dial. At the time, radium was thought to be medicinal or curative, so even though it was making many of the women sick, the company told the women that the radium was safe. Shining Lives is a musical stage play about four of those women and their experiences. The larger themes were of discrimination against women and workers, and of the power that men wielded over them in the early part of the 20th century. Seeing the play last night took the audience from entertaining to thought provoking to sadly emotional in 90 minutes. Bravo Northlight Theater for staging this world premier during your 40th anniversary year. Wherever I end up in the future, I hope that my life will be enriched by similar theater experiences to those I so often have at Northlight.