Last Tuesday, I experienced an emotion that I have never felt in my life.

Its not often that one can say that with certainty. Let me explain. For the last 3 months or so, I have been working on a project that culminated Tuesday. It all started when my Beatles tribute band went to Webster Hall and I was introduced to Lon Ballinger, the club’s owner. I eventually asked him if Webster Hall was pursuing a digital media strategy, and we had a long conversation about what that meant. Within a few weeks I found that the task was mine.

Soon after that, I was approached by Shane Savant (who choreographs the club’s dance performances and hosts some racy weekly burlesque parties). Shane told that he had met a guy from Sharp who wanted to talk to us about some sort of video sponsorship. Within a few days, I was on the phone with Judah Zeigler, the Associate Vice President of Retail & Consumer Marketing Group and the guy who made Sharp’s HD deals with NASCAR, NBC and Major League Baseball. After weeks of negotiations, I managed to swing a deal whereby Sharp would GIVE us 133 HD Screens ranging in sizes of 19 up to 65 inches. This is about $800,000 worth of retail product. In return, we offered a multitude of brand exposure and the use of the entire club, free of charge, one day per year. As soon as Judah heard that part of the offer, he jumped on it. July 15, 2008 was the date of the MLB All Star Game at Yankee Stadium. And Sharp is the official video partner of MLB. And Webster Hall was going to be the site of the only officially sanctioned All Star Game party attended by 1500 people.

Although I had never done anything even remotely like this before, I promised Sharp that the majority of the screens would be installed, cabled, networked and operational by July 15. I put together a great team of people and got cracking. I had my deadline and it was inviolate.

40 hours before game time, only 3 screens had been hung. Most of the cabling was laid, but there were thousands of feet of it all over the place. The $140,000 box that controls all of the signals had arrived, but it was unconnected and untested. And we were yet to build the “spectacular giant video wall consisting of nine 65 inch screens” that I had promised. Sound stressful?

10 hours before the game, the cabling was essentially complete. But many TV’s had to still be hung. We still had not received the delivery of 15 portable stands that would house many of the biggest screens.The HD signal in the building looked crappy. Worst of all, we simply could not get the giant video screen to scale properly (we wanted to put all nine screens in a giant rectangle and broadcast a single huge image of the game). By noon, the decision was made to abandon the giant wall and use an amazing 15,000 lumen HD projector instead. In the end, I figured this would be fine, since it allowed me to take the nine screens I was going to allocate to the wall and disperse them throughout the club. We would build the wall for another even, I hoped.

2 hours before the game, things seemed to be relatively on track, with one major unanticipated problem. Though we had beautiful HD everywhere, and things LOOKED amazing, for some reason that no one could pin down, we were unable to get the audio portion of the game to pipe through our million dollar sound system. My guys promised me that this would be solved by the first pitch. I, in turn, promised Sharp and MLB that there would be sound for the game. I am apparently very good at saying something I don’t believe with a straight face.

At 7:30, an hour before the game’s scheduled start, the doors opened and people poured in. The place looked great. HD video was everywhere. There was no issue about the audio yet, because until the game actually started at 8:32, the plan was always to play music throughout. But the fact was we still did not have audio.

At 8 pm, I saw John Loughlin, my head video technician running down the street outside the club. He had not slept in about 100 hours. “Where are you running, dude” I asked. “Radio Shack is a block away” he babbled. “I need a wireless transmitter that will enable me to send a signal from the Magenta Box in the basement up to the crow’s nest in the Grand Ballroom. That will make the audio work.” “Are you sure?”, I asked. “It’s a ghetto solution, but it SHOULD work” he said. Hardly convincing. This is gonna be ugly.

At 8:20, it became clear that John’s idea was not going to work. Something to do with signal polarity and sound impedance I think. But our lighting technician, Jake, had an idea. We could hard wire a cable directly from the basement to the sound system. But this would entail cutting some of the existing cable on both ends and soldering, on each end, a new connection that looks like the plastic end of an ethernet cable. Each connection would require perfectly soldering 9 wires. And it had to be done on both ends of the cable and it had to be done in 12 minutes.

At 8:30, Jake had finished soldering his end of the cable and Jake and John were carefully applying electrician’s tape to the basement end of the cable, which had just been soldered as well. “How much time do we have till the game starts?” they asked. “About 3 minutes”, I said. By this time my head was in my hands, my heart was in my throat, I was palpitating and I could barely breathe. After all of this work, the game was going to start and there would be no sound. Within seconds, people were going to ask us to turn down the music and turn on the game and we would have to tell the people from Sharp, the people from MLB, the executives from Pepsi and Budweiser and the 1500 guests that we had no sound for the game. This would ruin everything that was good about this installation. And all the blame would fall on me.

About a minute before game time, John and Jake announced that they were ready to plug in the basement end of the cable. Things could simply not have been more stressful. Everyone was on the verge of melting down. John and Jake were in communication by walkie talkie with our people upstairs. They plugged in their end of the cable and listened. I was in the basement, sitting across from them. I knew that if the news was good form the walkie talkies, they would start high-fiving one another. But there was no high-fiving. Instead, I saw John and Jake drop everything and literally RUN out the door and upstairs. Apparently, though there was no game audio in the Grand Ballroom, there WAS a moment of loud static when they connected the cable. This meant that a signal had been transmitted, but that something was not right about it. We all ran upstairs and John and Jake examined the problem. By this time, we were literally moments from the start of the game. Already, people were a little curious as to why we did not turn the sound up during Sheryl Crow’s singing of the national anthem, during the first pitch ceremony involving George Steinbrenner, or during the player introductions.

John and Jake figured the problem had to be that one of the connections was improperly grounded. They fiddled with the ground connections and….like some sonic apparition… the beautiful, glorious, mellifluous, crystal clear voices of the FOX Sports commentators came pouring through the speakers EXACTLY FIVE SECONDS BEFORE THE FIRST PITCH WAS THROWN.

Once I realized that I was actually hearing the game, I knew that the rest of the night was going to be amazing, no matter what else happened. I made my way downstairs to the center of the action and sat on one of the couches. I looked around. Everyone was having a great time. TV’s were everywhere. The place looked like something out of a fairy tale. Not like a sports bar, but more like someone’s giant, beautiful, 40,000 square foot living room. There was free beer, courtesy of Bud. There were hot dogs and peanuts and popcorn and apple pie and pulled pork sandwiches. And there was the MLB All Star Game on 50 giant Aquos screens. It was exactly what I had dreamed up in my head.

At that moment, I felt the enormity of what I had managed to pull off. From the very beginning. Making the deal with Sharp. Convincing the owners of Webster Hall to spend nearly $200,000 to install everything. Figuring out how to finance the project. Putting the technical team in place. Dealing with at least 3 separate occasions during which the owners told me to cancel the project and I had to talk them off of the ledge. Firing our cable installer a week before the event. “Borrowing” our cable signal from the bar next door. All of it.

I sat there, and I experienced an emotion that I had never felt in my life. Total, complete, utter, pure, overwhelming relief. It was so powerful a feeling that I just sat there, among hundreds of people, all having a great time, and bawled my eyes out for about 10 minutes. I could not care less that people were looking at me. This was a moment that was mine and mine alone and no one who did not live it could understand what I was feeling. In fact, I actually enjoyed it. It was like some cathartic wave coming over me, washing away all of the hellish mania that had literally consumed me for the past month.

After that, I walked out the door and took a cab over to my health club where I had one of the best showers I can ever recall. I changed my clothes, turned around and took a cab back to the club. I walked in at about 9:45. Rejuvenated, happy and normal.

Well not exactly normal. After all, I was still the madman who took all this on in the first place.