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”.