The Dancing Bug

Birthday jams have become a peeve of mine.

See, when I first started out, birthday jams were a surprise. If someone knew it was your birthday, they would secretly tell the DJ, and sometime during the night, when you least expected it, all of a sudden you were being jammed. It was like this amazing surprise present out of the blue that you didn’t expect.

But they aren’t special anymore. Now they’re more like cattle calls. Every night, without fail, during the DJ break, someone stands up and announces the birthday jam. Anyone? Calling once, calling twice. Anniversary? Bar mitzvah? Anyone?

Sometimes you get fifteen people out there. Hard to feel special in a huge mob like that. Seems kinda artificial and pointless.

A lot of times people are put on the spot. New dancers are dragged out there when they don’t even want to be. They can’t dance, and they don’t even know what’s happening; their friends think it’s hilarious.

Or there are the old timers who only show up once a year, on their birthday, and then leave after the jam is over. Is that fair? Is that playing by the rules? A birthday jam should be about friendship and community, not entitlement and obligation.

Recently I was present at a dance where the birthday person was out of the room when the jam was announced. He missed his window. His friends tried to get the DJ to announce it later, but the DJ was unwilling to muck up his playlist with unnecessary interruptions or something.

So what happened is that his friends took the grass-roots approach. They just quietly passed the word along that during the next song they would jam the birthday guy. He was so surprised when out of nowhere the crowd made a circle around him and suddenly he was in the spotlight. He was beaming the whole time, and it was the best birthday jam I’ve seen in forever.

I think we need to stop doing regular birthday jams and go back to doing them on a request-only basis. What do you all think?