The rainbow lights coming from the floor below. It’s the summer of 1999. A girl with long brown hair is dancing close with a boy. Lights from the floor pulsing to the beat. The girl is bent backwards on the floor while the boy gyrates above her. A crowd looks on. The, she removes her hair – it’s a wig! And she swings it around and around in the air. The crowd cheers and the dancing goes on and on and on. They jump up onstage now, the gyrations continue. Then the bouncer escorts them out, ejecting them into the summer night. It’s 1999
Flash forward. It’s last Friday night and I’m back at Spectrum: the gayest place on earth. I hadn’t been there since the night when my friend Dave and I were escorted out for dirty dancing. In my mind it was innocuous and campy, however in the mind of the bounce who patrolled beneath pulsating go-go boys in thongs, it was inappropriate and we were given fair warning. The thing about Spectrum is that it was the one place on earth where I was pretty much free from my inhibitions. Whereas in other clubs, I stand on the sidelines glaring and thinking or talking about how much I hate dancing, in Spectrum I’m the girl running my friends up to the stage and cheering when that crazy strobe light gets a going.
And so I found myself, five years later my wig and buzz cut replaced by a pony tail and bangs getting funky on the dance floor between one girl and a couple of boys with my engorged bandaged finger. Later, I left of my own accord and our lady car service driver told a long story about how she saw some guy from her neighborhood there even though he had a fiancé and my roommate Ross said he saw the local pizza boy.
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