Parties and Sunshine

Jersey City, NJ

So today I have a little story for you all. While on my holiday "up north" on Lake Michigan with the whole big fam, yes there were 9 of us in a single house together, the adults stayed up one night to watch a movie that my brother brought along. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. So it's a nice movie, I'm not going to write a review of it or anything. I'm mentioning it here because the closing scene made me remember an end to a party night in 1995 when I was a Freshman at NYU. The final scene of the film is dawn in NYC after a long musically inclined night. It's so much fun to remember partying as a young lady! I had been in NYC for about a month and a half, moving there from rural northwestern Indiana where I spent most of my childhood. The morning after I arrived in New York, as I had planned all summer, I woke up early totally giddy to be in NYC and on my own, headed down to the Antinque Boutique, a vintage clothing store slash designer boutique, to purchase my fuchsia Manic Panic - my hair was totally awesome that first semester! Long, curly, and very pink! Anyway, I only had one rave under my belt by that point. In my search through record stores and cheesy "raver" style clothing stores, I garnished a nice collection of flyers. Sputnik 6 by Satellite Productions was the rave I selected on the weekend of October 6 when my brother and mom were coming up to visit me. I can't even remember who the DJs were for that party. It was in 1995, so I don't expect there to be a whole lot about it online, but I searched anyway. Apparently there were Sputnik parties every year in the New York/New Jersey area for a number of years and we went to number 6. We took the PATH train into Jersey City and gradually found our way to the warehouse. It was a lot of fun, although I don't remember much of it, it was so long ago. We met up with my friend Margeaux who I had recently met at school. In a single night, my super friendly younger brother (who is now a DJ in Chicago, Gregory Dalphond) got to know Margeaux better than I had in the whole month and a half that I had known her. Shy D, yep that's me. So after the party, we walked back to the train station to take the PATH train back into Manhattan. There were two choices, take the train to the World Trade Center or the train that heads farther up toward midtown Manhattan and made multiple stops along the way. We needed to go downtown to the World Trade Center station because my mom was staying in a hotel down there. However, we got on the wrong train and ended up at 23rd street. My fault, I was still learning the city and although I kind of knew how to get around Manhattan on the subway, New Jersey was a whole other story. So we realized our mistake and came up to street level to be pleasantly surprised by the sun gently rising up over the city. The morning was so cool and fresh and the dawn light felt so lovely after a long dark night. We figured out which train to take back downtown and all was well. My sweetest and strongest memory from that night was the dawn light. I didn't go to any more raves in New York after that, I went to a few in Chicago when I was home, and mostly went out to clubs in New York - Shelter was my favorite!! And The Roxy, I loved the wooden floor. The wiki pages for Shelter and The Roxy are interesting. So there you have it, nice memories triggered by the dawn light in a movie that I stayed up way too late to watch trying to drink a beer that wouldn't even fit into my glass because the head was so giant (I think it got too fizzed up on the drive up there). Freaking Arbor Brewing Co. Sacred Cow IPA - tasty and temperamental.