Daytime was disorienting for club kids. You’d see them moving around in the streets to the same rhythms that pushed them around the dance floor the night before. The echo of the club sounds and the general morning grogginess of nighthawks conspired with the eyes to produce strange effects. Like jellyfish below, or angels above, their movements left tactile waves or visible auras; halos perhaps, extrusions from the abject joy overflow. Maybe it’s true that any vista of any crowd would produce something like this to the reddened eye, but it was certainly more evident with club kids, because of the latency of the party, and the muscle memory of musical beat that still governed their limbs. Their bodies had become dedicated to the rhythm, like good spouses, or addicts. It was what moved them physically and emotionally. It was what allowed them to dance three hours straight without a break in a smoky club, and compelled them to go back again, night after night. The clubs were not elite salons. Many were very seedy places where danger held the first table. All were expensive in a time of Reaganomics, where jobs were hard to come by in rust belt cities, where the factories just kept closing. Yet, the outside world seemed to matter little on the dance floor, so they came, poor, bucking danger and ruin, ducking bookies and exes to satisfy the craving for that certain euphoria only found where the music enters your body and you surrender. Better than drugs they’d say; and they were right.

-Danny Grosso

The lights would get so bright on the pulse that for a moment it would look like the dance floor had been transported out of doors, to some English garden party when the late spring flora  had exploded with color. Color – that moment of transformation from blue and black to psychedelia, on the pulse of a two-second strobe, was not something he imagined to take from this less than fabulous neighborhood club. The bodies moving within that light, the multi-hued swirling of pegged pants and skirts, cravats and headbands, against a sunbox of light, approximated a Lichtenstein in a centrifuge. Inside of this ordinary brick building with unfinished walls was a living museum of modern art, a prescient multi-media performance piece in a place where few had ever visited an art museum.

We are all artists in our ecstasy, he thought, and then girded himself for the thrill of the next pulse of light.

-Danny Grosso