Protective eyeware. Believe me, from personal experience.

Note: this is assuming that you want to have some fun in your lab also...
Jacobs ladders are fun (make sure you demonstrate the danger by putting something non-conductive in the path of the rising spark ... and have water standing by to put out the fire), but Marx generators are the better way to learn about high voltages. You can make a "small one" with parts from your local electronics hobbiest store
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx_generator [wikipedia.org] and http://www.electricstuff.co.uk/marxgen.htm [electricstuff.co.uk]
You can also learn about the problems with scaling... once you get the small one working with 100,000 volts, you WILL get the urge to scale up and try for half a million but you will also learn how off-the-shelf parts can fail when pushed to the limit.
Also, I echo the first poster's comment: get some good safety glasses
when fooling around with high voltages, things explode.

Does anyone know where to get good quality ANALOG meters anymore? Everyone seems to have gone digital and I don't like 'em.

I'm currently getting a Fluke 43b meter to be the primary testing equipment and will be wiring the entire lab to every possible variation of AC and DC voltage.

A knowlegeable person in the field would likely not have said this. This sentance implies to me that you're not old enough and mature enough to work with dangerous voltage & currents. Knowlege in electronics is a noble persuit. Be aware that it can be lethal.

On a tangent.. it's funny how lawyers have become the new priests against progress.

Some of the things you could NEVER realistically build and test legally, as a home scientist, in the united states (and to be fair, many other places):

- The wright brothers' first plane
- A (small scale) fission reactor
- An experimental, home-built car
- A high powered rocket
- A radar
- A high powered laser
- A medical test lab

I'm not saying it's good or bad... I'm just saying. We used to fear studying science because the religious guys would come burn us, or throw us down a well. Now we risk getting shot, imprisoned, sued, etc., by the state (not just by individuals who were harmed in the process).

It sometimes saddens me to think how many Edisons, Einsteins, Teslas, or DiVincis have passed us by in the last 50 years, because, as you say, working on science is often illegal.

a refrigerator. Good for lunch and bacterial cultures.

Ummmm, no. Get 2 fridges, one with a lock for the lab for chemicals and/or cultures.

Keep the fridge for the food in a seperate area. Don't mix them up. You don't want to poison yourself, do you?