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2001 The End of Public Nights

 1999 Colors starts "Club Elektra"

Friday May 3, 1996 was Colors grand opening night! During the previous 12 months we distributed over a 1,000 free admission tickets for the grand opening. At 7:00 p.m. when the doors had finally opened, we had a line clear down the street to the corner. Grand opening night was an overwhelming success. During 1996 Colors was open every day of the week. Mondays, Tuesdays & Thursdays kids came in to watch TV, play board games and do homework. We didn’t have any dancing on those days, just mingling. From 1996 to 2000 we did birthday parties just 2 days a week, and we had our public dance and game nights the rest of the week. Young kids ages 6 & up came in on Wednesdays & Fridays to dance while their parents sat back and watched all the fun. Kids that didn’t want to dance used handheld electronic games, board games, video games and chat phones. Admission was only $2 per person and the party was four hours long! We also offered a full food menu. If you’d like to see the original food menu, you can click colorsparty.com/news/4842 (link opens in new window). Saturday night events were for the older teens, ages 15 & up. We even had a later Thursday night party for Seton Hill College and St. Vincent College students ages 18 & up. Colors was founded around and for the kids. We had weekly meetings where 20-40 volunteers came to decide on the upcoming parties and events. Colors volunteers worked in three areas: our snack shop, at the front door, and in our hi-tech control booth (a sound engineer, lighting & special effects coordinator). We also had a volunteer “Go-Team,” which helped to distribute board games, electronic games, and helped with anything else needed. Colors was designed for the kids, and in the beginning was even ran by the kids. It was directed and supervised, but nonetheless, ran by the kids. We tried to empower the kids to make good decisions and help them to make a difference by serving others. One year about 20 of our volunteers worked to decorate city hall for Christmas. We put up almost 40,000 lights which were all donated by Colors. We marketed Colors public nights as a place to come to get motivation to do better in school. See a 1996 tribune review newspaper ad by clicking colorsparty.com/news/3852 (link opens in new window). Regarding the construction of Colors, it took us two full years to design and built it. Back in 1993 we put up a 23-foot wide sign which said “Colors coming in May 1996”. We needed that time since many of things we wanted to put in Colors didn’t exist, like the chat phones, talking bathrooms, inside fountain and even the self-watering trees outside. So we had to design and build it all from scratch. Even our lighting and sound systems were custom designed and were unlike anything else. Keep in mind that this was all back in 1996 and we were already playing mp3s. No one knew at the time what they were. Our control booth used touch screen “light-pens”. So we had these young volunteers learning how to use that new state-of-the-art equipment – equipment that professionals in big city places didn’t even have. Years later many of our volunteers chose career paths based on what they had learned working at Colors. Over the next 15 years many things would change in Colors. Around the year 2000, due to the exceptional demand for birthday parties at Colors, we were forced to close the public nights and do birthday and other PRIVATE parties, 7-days a week. We still have volunteers, we’re still about the community, but now more than ever Colors is about private parties by invitation only, specifically Birthdays!

In 618 Clay Avenue Jeannette PA 15644.