8/19/06 - 8/21/06: One of the best weekends in a long time at Dragonfly. Friday night brought techno upstairs, and Saturday night brought Meghan.

For starters, I arrived on Friday night to the sound of midtempo techno wafting down from upstairs. DJ Matrix had decided to shake things up a bit by deviating from the standard traditional Latin fare for the first hour or so. Everything at Dragonfly was built for dance music. The DSP is set for tight bass and dull highs, the lights were programmed for 110+ bpm, and the general vibe is just better with uptempo music. Nothing against salsa / merengue / etc, but it’s just not the same.

Then there was Saturday.

DJ Smooth has been on his honeymoon overseas for the past four weeks (I think it’s his seventh honeymoon this year, but I lost count), which means DJ Herc has been spinning on both floors from the Level One DJ booth. This, in turn, means that I have the upstairs booth all to myself for four hours. As fun as that sounds, it isn’t.

Enter Meghan, stage left. I recently switched gears and got an IT job (more on that in another post), which means I’m effectively retiring from the wireless industry. We decided that we were going to have a retirement party, and since the booth was all mine, we turned it into an ultra-exclusive VIP lounge for the night.

Judd learned of my plans.

We arrived at the usual time (me slightly before her). After a trek up to Palumbo’s to get the night’s fare (Italian grinder slices, highly recommended and a steal at only $3.95), we headed back to Dragonfly.

“What happens if it rains?” she asked as we walked past the diner.
“I think they lose about 80% capacity,” I said.

“LOL diner!” I added.

We got back to Dragonfly and headed upstairs. I was somewhat surprised to hear a mix CD of downtempo, acid-jazz-like stuff playing. It even transitioned into a deep house track or two, which was really surprising given our usual Saturday night crowd.

I was even MORE surprised to get into the booth and see that it had been completely cleaned. The booth gets notoriously messy; Saturday night it was immaculate.

I was then EVEN MORE surprised to see not one, but two bottles of champagne on ice in a silver bucket, complete with glasses and candles.

Glasses.

See, Dragonfly stopped using glass cups around the time Level One opened, which would have been early 2003. Everything comes in plastic cups. If you actually pay for a VIP rental (which generally starts around $2500), you’ll get real glass, but otherwise it’s Dixie all around.

We got glass. Thanks, Judd.

Champagne + candles + the booth isolated from the crowd + Palumbo’s = the night is off to a great start. To fully complete the atmosphere, I disconnected the booth monitor from the mixer and hooked it up to my MP3 player via a necessarily long string of adapters. The end result is that while the club was getting blasted with slow, boring hip hop, we were enjoying primo vintage-2003 recordings from Andy Vicious. The punchline came during a particularly slow, quiet breakdown in the hip-hop set. Apparently the monitor (which was cranked to overcome the house system) was audible outside the booth, as about two dozen people turned around and looked at us all at the same time. We must’ve been jamming up around 130bpm at the time, which must’ve looked hillarious compared to the 65bpm-or-so crunk that Herc was spinning.

I’m pretty sure I accidentally set the lights going to the dance music once or twice, but oh well.

So all in all, it was a great weekend. Meghan drafted her outfit for the Vault / Metron reunion party on September 1st, which promises to be a fun evening. I highly recommend attendance.