Hang the DJ

We are fortunate enough to have friends who have a family place on a lake not much more than an hour north of the city – it has a deck and a hammock under trees and a very pretty view of various waterfowl doing their waterfowl things on the lake, and a rowboat docked there so that if you wanted to go bother the waterfowl up close you could do that sort of thing. It is in short a tremendously fine place to spend a couple of days when NYC’s atmosphere resembles nothing quite so much as a mangrove swamp at high noon. I spent Friday night unable to say much more than how I really hadn’t been able to imagine how nice and cool it would be there, and how lovely the breeze was, and how really surprised I was at the difference in temperature, and could I by any chance borrow a sweater?

On Saturday, full of the energy that comes from being rescued from the urban sauna, we all sauntered down the road to check out the annual post-Independence-day party held at the neighborhood “beach” (a small zone of sand from which hardy youngsters could splash about in the shallow lake) under the auspices of the neighborhood association. There was the usual assortment of grills and grillables, pillow-sized bags of snack product, assorted and rather delicious-looking versions of potato salad. In order that a sense of carnival might be truly invoked, several rented machines were in evidence: a child-sized dunking machine, which allowed a succession of gleeful victims to perch on a platform above a small tub of cloudy water, there to await the tennis ball that would collapse the board and plunge them into their lukewarm fate; a sno-cone making machine, which looked to have dated from the early years of the industrial revolution (though the flavored goop which was to go atop the shaved ice came in several hues probably not seen prior to the nuclear arms race); and one of those inflated chambers we used to know as a “moon walk”, designed for the bouncing-around pleasure of 5-10 kids. The activity in this one resembled a preteen mosh pit, and the younger kids hovered meekly around the periphery, waiting for the lumbering seventh-graders to tire of their WWF antics.

There was also a DJ. At the edge of the action, a bank of machines under a tarp, and a busy figure plugging multiple devices together, testified to the presence on the scene of an Entertainment Professional who would make, by his attention, the afternoon’s gathering not merely a party, but a par-tay. A few minutes after we were there, he got things off to an official start with a club remix of the theme music from the Fox network’s regular NFL coverage (I’m not kidding or exaggerating. That’s exactly what it was. I would have been no more surprised to hear a hiphop version of the theme to “ABC World News with Peter Jennings”). After laying a sanitized Kid Rock cut on us, he then launched a version (Lee Greenwood, I think) of “God Bless America”, which he embellished with some voiceover of his own, welcoming us in an aggressively hearty way to the party and suggesting that by enjoying ourselves we would be telling “someone who wants Americans to cower in fear this weekend” that he could “suck an egg.” (He repeated the phrase “suck an egg” for emphasis.)

We headed for the house at about this point, since it was well past lunchtime, to say nothing of hammock-time; and all and sundry made for various comfortable spots (such as the hammock) and prepared to enjoy a leisurely afternoon of Pretending to Read. We thought nothing more of the DJ.

Until the stillness of the afternoon, and the delightful efficiency with which sound carries over water, brought us back into his world. We were, it turned out, his captives for an afternoon. We heard the Macarena; we heard “Red Red Wine”; we heard that really stupid reggae cover version of “Angel of the Morning” (which prompted a lot of discussion about whether or not Juice Newton could be referred to as a “singer-songwriter.”) We heard a number of things that we usually hear in sports arenas, but with thumping bass added. Then the karaoke-style voiceovers commenced. I have repressed much of this, but I still have echoes of “My Way” and Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” contaminating my mid-short-term memories. When he started in with Carlos Santana (“Smooth”), I actually contemplated going back there to plead for mercy.

Eventually he stopped, and the sound of his stentorian voice and his ill-selected beats faded like a bad dream. But I will never forget him as a testament to the power of a single person and some amplifiers to really crap up a beautiful place.

Posted by BT at July 07, 2002 09:01 PM