A Hard Day's Night

My new Liverpudlian friend came down to London last weekend. On Friday night we waited in line at what seemed like a perfectly ordinary restaurant at least a half an hour, before being surreptitiously ushered into a secret door disguised as a kitchen refrigerator. The secret passage led down to a dark, wood-paneled pub with wingback armchairs and very strong Old Fashioneds.

On Saturday we went to a street dance party with a bunch of his friends from college. The weather was perfect—hardly a cloud in the sky for once.  After 6+ hours of dancing during the day, we then went to the after-party, which was set up in an empty carpark. I just can’t dance as long as I used to, and I’ve never really enjoyed dancing to the stuff that the Europeans love, the drum and bass, trance/house/techno/whatever they are calling it now music. It’s fun for a while but then you realize that all the songs sound the same and that the two Red Bulls that you downed earlier have worn off. So I people-watched for the last hour. The whole scene brought back so many memories of being in Germany in high school. The English will hate me for calling them European, but when it comes to dance parties, it may as well have been 2002 on the Continent again.

A few of my friends will attest that I was concerned about what one wears to a street dance party turned indoor after-party with people that are in all likelihood younger than I am and indisputably cooler. So you can imagine my delight when one hipster girl, wearing a ruffled denim skirt and at least three differently flower-patterned accessories, told me that she liked my jacket.


Can you spot said jacket (with me in it!) in this video made of the event around the 30 sec mark? hint: it's orange.