In my last column, I covered some of the evolution of the Broward indie parties that developed near the time of my run as a disco infiltrator/performance artist in the club scene, as well as trying to recall various dancing maneuvers. Here, I catch them at the peak.
The pinnacle of indie Thursday-night parties (and my routine), to my
recollection, was called Phoenix, and it was held at a club called
Roxanne's mostly in 2006. By the time Roxanne's opened, I was already in dancing shape. I had a
basic costume (the short shorts that D-Wade mocks Charles Barkley for
wearing in the T-mobile fave five commercials)
and a tank top. This contrasted well with the bulk of the more
fashionable crowd, though I do recall being told by a few key people
that I should wear tight jeans and that wearing girl's jeans was the
rage. Eventually, I found some of those jeans, and I would walk around
the club pointing at my jeans loudly declaring "girl's jeans"! I got a
great deal of fashion mileage out of that.
I asked a former DJ, John Lovell,
what he remembered of my dance attack, and he wrote that "seeing you do
your thing on the dance floor was hilarious at first, for obvious
reasons. You're moving around like a crazy person. Not really making too
much sense. But once I saw you do this on a regular basis, it really
started affecting me, and it dawned on me that it wasn't just funny and
weird... it was brilliant. And I loved it."
A few more moves that played well inside of club social dynamics:
1. Marching is a great way to be next to people who are
cutting loose. It also allows you to slowly move through the dance
floor. Marching in place works too.
2. If marching isn't your speed and you need to get to the bar or
bathroom (or outside of the club so you can get a drink from the car
bar), then the best move was an odd aspect to lively dance floors. The
way to move anywhere on the floor is to get low to the ground and run
like you're a small person. This will sound as if you're going to crash
into everyone, but once you learn the move -- I did this by trial and
error -- you can duck and pop back up
anywhere on the floor. This probably is one for the reenactment.
3. The queen's wave was usually mixed with marching.
It was a great reflection of all things pretentious that can be
encountered in these types of social settings. Or if you just feel like
doing the queen's wave while you're marching around. Queen's wave (AKA
the politician's wave) was usually mixed with marching.
This routine served me well for most 2005-06 as I developed it by
trial and error, motivated by boredom and whiskey and a sense of why the
hell not. But I ended up dealing with a kind of opposition that was
much different and much more of the organized variety than your garden-variety stuff I encountered in Broward. In the middle of 2006, I began
going to the party in Miami that Crush was modeled after: Poplife. A
matter we'll delve into next week unless I take a quick break to do some
dance floor reenactments or maybe do some coverage of the Democratic
Party's annual Jefferson Jackson dinner that I attended last weekend.
Evan Rowe is a local songwriter and performer best-known as
Catalonia, a professor of political science and history at Broward
College, and a small-d democratic strategist with no party affiliation.
Each week, we surrender our space for his thoughts on the music industry
and how they relate to our region.