Remembering the Online Dance Party

Sunday, March 15th 2020 is when the pandemic officially started, at least for most people in the U.S. That was the day most of us found out we wouldn’t be coming into work the next day, or, in many cases, ever again, at least for that employer. Though the pandemic had been officially declared a few days earlier, on Wednesday, It wasn’t until Sunday that the repercussions of that announcement became clear, and that the world would never be the same again.

I wanted to help, but I wasn’t sure how. A few days later, on Wednesday, I decided the best I could offer was distraction, so I announced online that I’d be playing some music on Twitch, then a platform used almost exclusively by gamers, but one I’d occasionally used in the past to livestream my performances as a DJ. As you now know, the idea caught on, and before you knew it, being a Twitch DJ became “a thing.”

What was to be a one-time dance party became a weekly gathering on Friday nights. At its height, my Online Dance Party had over 600 participants in the virtual room. For a while– 19 weeks, to be precise– I followed each Friday show with a short Saturday write-up of what we’d done the night before, along with the songs I’d played. It wasn’t easy to compile that data, as I was playing mostly vinyl records. When I share playlists from past events, I’ve typically used Serato, so creating a chronological list of the songs I played is relatively easy. When it’s vinyl, it means a lot of note-taking and rewatching of the previous night’s stream. Nonetheless, it was the pandemic, and like Buckaroo Banzai said, “Time? I got nothing but time.”

The Online Dance Party lasted for a long time. June 18, 2021 was the final dance party, and my 2 Years on Twitch Anniversary Party on June 27, 2021 was the final incarnation of the event. Now, almost three years after the fact, it’s nothing but a fond memory.

As I’ve been migrating posts from the old site to this new one, I was reading through some of the old Dance Party recaps, and started wishing I’d done write-ups on them all. It’s too late to do that now, but the best I can do in lieu of playlists is to share some of the images that were used to promote the past events. While I no longer remember what I played at any of these, I do remember each and every one, and all the good times I had with my audience, both regulars and anonymous strangers. Cheers to all of you! I hope I made your Fridays a little easier in those uncertain times.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this walk down dance party memory lane as much as I have. I almost feel inspired to fire up the webcams, dust off the Stream Deck, drop a disc onto the platter and stream on Twitch once more, for old time’s sake.