no phones on the dance floor
a night at school
The skyline had been painted over with a stone gray haze. Below street lights, you could make out the snowflakes dancing in the wind. By the windows, cool air exhaled into the sweaty space. Rhythmic electronic music pulsed through the air, the ground, the bones of dancers. Some were dressed like characters from The Breakfast Club and others like the extras in a LMFAO music video. Everyone resembled an archetype of the people you’d find in a school: nerds, jocks, athletes, teachers, even a janitor. The decor matched — a set of decorated lockers flanked a stage where a dark green chalkboard stood, coated in messages in multi-colored chalk.
The hosts of this party, Book Club Radio, had rules for the event, which made the entire experience feel more like school. The notable ones:
Face each other instead of the DJ.
No phones allowed on the dance floor.
Dress to express yourself.
Dance your heart out.
It was unlike any other party that I had gone to. People watching was more entertaining than ever before, it was rare to see anyone on their phone, and the dance floor was filled with people actually dancing.
These rules reached toward an earlier version of dance parties, focused on music and dancing rather than celebrity DJs and self-documentation of a good time (in lieu of actually having a good time). Wrapped up in the aesthetic of high school, the whole experience dripped with nostalgia, but not in a bad way. We got to live out this strange facsimile of school, where there were no classes, but there were rules and we were forced to be present and disconnected from the world outside. There was genuine joy in the experience, as everyone got to perform their outfits, throw paper airplanes, and dance to some great music.
I was dressed as a teacher, wearing a tie that A had gotten me (featuring a cartoon teacher in front of a chalkboard), and A was dressed like a schoolgirl. We joked about having an illicit romance, moving to the music. As we danced, we gazed across the crowd, finding different characters to pay attention to, enjoyed their enjoyment. A dance circle formed around a man in a skirt, someone dressed as a janitor danced with a mop and a wet floor sign. The sun set. The music picked up, the crowd grew denser, and the snowflakes grew thicker.
My main intention for 2026 was to spend more time outside of my apartment. The idea was simple — too much of my life was happening online, at home. Real life had become an escape from digital life, and I sought to reset the balance. But simply going outside wouldn’t be enough. I knew that I wanted to lean into what was most different from what I could find at home. I sought the unpredictable and human, the surprising things that appear when you leave what’s familiar and get to witness people being people.
And so I found myself in a cardigan, being handed a paper airplane by a man who looked like he could’ve been a stoner I knew in high school, nodding my head to techno. Eventually, we grew tired after a few hours of dancing. We headed home.
With the winter’s unrelenting freezing temperatures and waves of rain and snow, it had felt difficult to ever leave home or go outside at all. But that night, humming with energy from our day at school, we walked through the snow. The quietness of the streets was amplified after the volume of the speakers. We delighted in the sound the fresh snow made under our shoes. Neither of us had grown up in snowy places; this was magic. I thought of the winter mornings as a kid when I would climb down from my bunk bed and run to the window, hoping for snow.
Imagine that younger version of myself reacting to me dressing up to pretend to be in school. Imagine him watching me dance my heart out, imagine him seeing my snowball fight at twilight. Think of the alternative: another night at home, watching something on Netflix, unaware of the beauty that night held.
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
ALBUM - Aqua by Hiroshi Sato - city pop!
POEM - “It Is Not the Fact That I Will Die That I Mind” by Jim Moore - but that no one will love as I did / the oak tree out my boyhood window
Loved how the intentional constraints (no phones, dress code) actually expanded the experience rather than limiting it. There's something counterintuitive about how boundries can create freedom. I've noticed at concerts that banning phones forces everyone to develop a shared memory instead of curating individual ones, which changes the whole energy in teh room.
shame on u for using ur phone at the cassandra jenkins concert