You really want to know?
It was one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time. I was living in Lowestoft and, with a friend, was working on a project for the Edinburgh Festival. We wanted to do something absurd, so we came up with the idea of staging 2001 - A Space Odyssey - in the back of a Hillman Avenger (a small and rather naff saloon car). The idea was that we would have an audience of one (in the passenger seat), the driver would be the stage manager and look after the techie stuff (like cueing the music on the car's cassette player) and two would act out the protean drama on the back seat, with a black velvet curtain dividing the car in two.
We'd got the ape costumes sorted, space costumes were knocked up from boiler suits, vacuum cleaner hose and old crash hats and props were found.
What we needed, though, was something to sum up the glinting stars and the trippiness of Kubrik's movie.
Then we hit on using a 12-volt UV strip and fluorescent paint. Many a happy hour was spent blobbing stars onto black cloth to line the rear of the car, and painting little suns and moons to shine under the UV light (the way your dandruff takes on a praeternatural glow in discos, for those old enough to remember such horrors).
Then we got onto the vodka. By the end of the evening the four of us had someone taken our clothes off and painted our giblets variously pink, yellow, orange and blue and were leaping around lit only by the UV light. As you do.
It did look bloody weird - like a flock of stunted psychedelic turkeys invading an acid trip! The more so because this was inn a basement flat on Lowestoft seafront, and people walking by could peer in and see this bizarre spectacle.
Anyway, minus the giblets, 2001 in the car was a resounding success - eight performances, total audience of eight, and pisstaking coverage in all sorts of earnest Dutch and Norwegian newspapers. Where everyone else's efforts were listed by venue -"Godot - in the Assembly Rooms", we got "2001 - ERT 940J, parked on the corner of..."
And no, Ella, it doesn't sting - not if you use the water-based type. But you do need a UV light and no other ambient light for the full effect.
Sorry, where was I? Nurse....!