I spent most of Sunday at the Rachel’s Lakeside Bridal Fair. This was my fourth year taking part in this show, and I tend to do very well with the leads that I get from it. In short, my thank-you note to the Rachel’s staff is already in the mail and I’ll sign on for next year’s show as soon as I receive their invitation. Year after year, they somehow find ways to make an already great show even better!
Over the course of the afternoon, I ran into a few people I knew and met a number of new faces. If you’re getting married in 2009, you’ll definitely want to attend next year’s show!
My event last Saturday night was an 80th birthday party at the Hawthorne Country Club; Hawthorne had referred me to the clients. The evening started at 6:30 with a cocktail hour, and our guest of honor arrived at 7:15 to overwhelming applause (she thought she was going to a dinner/dance). After a toast, dinner and then dessert, the dancing began and continued until the very end of the party. I’m pretty sure I covered just about every style of music – some jazz and standards during cocktail hour, pop favorites during dinner, a few country requests, and some current hits later in the evening. Who would have guessed that our guest of honor would be dancing to “Low” by Flo Rida at 20 minutes to midnight? It was a wonderful party.
I had a fantastic weekend, working an 80th Birthday Party on Saturday night and speaking with brides at yesterday’s bridal show. I’ll have recaps of those events later on, but I wanted to take a second and do some quick networking. I’m a huge fan of both MySpace and Facebook, as they help me stay in touch with friends who might otherwise be “long-lost”. They’ve helped bring in some additional business leads, too.
If you’re on MySpace or Facebook, I’d love to hear from you. You can visit my MySpace page here. If you’re on Facebook, you can view my profile here.
I like to keep this blog updated pretty frequently, but in a lot of ways this blog is a lot like my style when I’m using a microphone: I keep things concise, and I never speak just because I like hearing the sound of my own voice. Take note: if you want a DJ who’ll be screaming needlessly into the microphone all night long like a rapper promoting his next CD, I’m not that guy.
With that said, I’ve been doing some really great things lately that I haven’t posted about yet. Here’s just a sample:
- A couple of weeks ago, I met with a business coach. We talked about my business, how I’d like to improve it, and what steps I can take to better communicate with my clients. I’m already putting some of his suggestions to work. Read more…
Aspiring club DJs worldwide dream of landing a residency; it’s when a nightclub contracts them to appear regularly for an specified period of time. My nightclub DJ days are long behind me – I worked at a number of spots in the New Bedford and Providence areas in the late 1990s but I couldn’t pass up the calls I would get to DJ weddings and parties, which generally paid more. At that time, residencies were unheard of in the club world.
Seeing as Taunton’s Hopewell School hired me for two events on consecutive nights, I suppose I could be the first DJ with a residency at a public elementary school. The weekend of K-4 fun started on Friday night, with the school’s annual Father/Daughter Dance. More than 90 students showed up with their dads and spent two hours dancing to their favorite songs. Fortunately, I’ve got an ample supply of Hannah Montana, High School Musical and the Jonas Brothers. It was a fantastic event.
On Saturday night I hosted the school’s first-ever Mother/Son dance. This one was going to be a challenge, and I knew that going into it – obviously, boys aren’t too keen on the idea of dancing with their moms, and they’re definitely not into Hannah Montana. So, I came up with a few team-oriented games to play, stuck to the songs that they’d like, and the dance seemed to go by just as quickly as it did the previous night. The Hopewell PTT was impressed with my efforts; in the words of one of the chaperones, “we want to OWN you”.
