Just make sure the party ends by 10 p.m.
Looking back, it seems sadly obvious that it was too good to be true. All that joy. Remember? Remember the flood of adrenaline and endorphins when Kamala Harris stepped up to the plate after Joe Biden dropped out? All the brat-green memes? All the group texts with your girlfriends and sisters and moms and aunts? All the music at the delegate roll call in Chicago? All the Beyoncé? All the laughing?
All that joy. All that female joy.
Then it all seemed to evaporate overnight in a red haze on November 5th. It was so fleeting, popping up seemingly out of nowhere after a long, relatively sleepy four years of pandemic living and languishing, shuffling gerontocracy and stale patriarchy, and just as quickly vanishing, giving way to another four years of… well, we don’t quite know just yet. What we do know is that there will be chaos, and in all likelihood, fewer opportunities for collective joy like we felt last summer. The joy that energized us has now curdled into disbelief, sadness, anger, despair, anxiety, even resignation.
This is the state I was in when I found myself at a dance party in Brooklyn, less than two weeks after the election. In February, my college roommate and dear friend Susie Lee and her friend from high school, Laura Baginski, created Earlybirds Club in Chicago, a dance party for middle-aged women that starts and ends early. Since then, it’s taken off in the Windy City, with events twice a month for women and female-identified, trans, and non-binary people. Tickets sell out as fast as a Taylor Swift concert. And now they were bringing the party to New York.
Looking through my closet and dresser to find something to wear, I wondered how my wardrobe had become so lifeless, so blah. Neutral-colored comfy cardigans, “work” clothes that never come off the hanger since I now work remotely, loose linen dresses, stretched-out leggings, dingy t-shirts with holes from overuse.
I did not want my usual working-from-home-mom-of-a-middle-schooler look, so I landed on my favorite jeans and a black sleeveless sequined top that still had the tags on it from who-knows-when. I did my eye makeup like when I used to “go out.” Hello, eyeliner old friend. I slipped the tube of red lipstick I’d just put on into my teeny, silvery metallic bag. I dusted off, literally, a cute pair of black suede boots and put them on. Though they had only a modest heel, I could feel them pinching my feet immediately. Nope, no freaking way. I threw on my most comfortable, most cushioned pair of sneakers. Yes. Smoky eyes and Hokas—this is living.
The party started slowly, with a few women trickling in when the doors opened at 6 p.m. Some stood around with the girlfriends they’d come with, some ordered drinks (the Hot Flash cocktail special was particularly popular), and some were already on the dance floor. By 7:30, the place was packed, at full capacity and throbbing with women dancing with abandon to New Order, the Cure, Salt-N-Pepa, Madonna, and Charlie XCX. By the time Laura and Susie took the stage to briefly tell their story, it was hard to get the crowd to calm down for even a few minutes.
“We didn’t start Earlybirds as a political statement or protest, but it sure feels like that now,” said Laura into the mic. “Providing a way for women and the trans and non-binary communities to come together and support each other takes on so much more meaning after the election.” The crowd responded with raucous agreement, hands waving high in the air.
When Susie began to speak, the crowd had to be shushed to complete silence. Susie has metastatic breast cancer and no longer has the use of her vocal cords beyond a whisper. The mic amplified her raspy yell-whisper as she spoke about how she and Laura wanted to create a safe space for women to have fun, and about the importance of women supporting women. The crowd roared its approval again, and the DJ kicked the tunes back up.
And we kept dancing. We put neon glow bracelets on our arms and glitter stickers on our faces. We threw our arms around each other and sang at the top of our lungs when Wilson Phillips’ “Hold On” came on. We smiled and laughed while our bodies got sweaty and thrillingly tired.
As we head into 2025, I know I’m not alone harboring not a small amount of dread over the inevitable horrors and catastrophes to come. Shall I list for you some of the cards in this deck stacked against us? Okay, sure thing. Well, just to start with table stakes, we are not guaranteed control over our own bodies. We do the lion’s share of care work in this country, most of it invisible and unacknowledged, certainly not paid. We still make less money than men. We are subject to violence at an astonishing rate. We experience unnecessary pain because research and funding for women’s health is not prioritized. We still haven’t elected a president who looks like us. And now we get to live in a world where the monsters have taken off their masks and are now just saying outright “your body, my choice.”
Yes, it’s grim. And that’s just scratching the surface.
So how are we going to get through these next four years? Wait, no
—baby steps. How are we going to get through the next year? Whatever happens to #TheResistance this time around, there is real political and organizational work to be done. We need to figure out how to protest and resist, and how to rebuild. But so many of us are tired and worn down. Sometimes it feels like we are just trying to survive, but what about thriving when we can, too?
If you ask Google “what is joy,” you’ll get a multitude of similar-sounding definitions: “a feeling of great pleasure or happiness that comes from success, good fortune, or a sense of well-being”; “the emotion of great delight or happiness caused by something exceptionally good or satisfying; keen pleasure; elation”; “a feeling, but it is also an attitude toward life” (haha, okay); “the state of being that allows one to experience feelings of intense, long-lasting happiness and contentment of life.”
I mean, I guess, sure, but allow me to supply an alternate definition: Joy is 150 middle-aged women dancing together for four hours. This communal joy can help us get through 2025. Let joy be our revenge against a world that continues to put obstacles in our way. Joy can be our sanctuary, providing a momentary safe haven. Joy can be our protest, an act of resistance. Screw JD Vance.
Joy requires courage. It requires the bravery and fortitude to pick ourselves up and not give in—at least not all the time—to the darkness around us.
I thought of this when I looked at my friend Susie. Despite having metastatic breast cancer, she is out there using her precious time and energy to create and experience joy. Life brings us great pain, but lucky for us, we can create joy to sustain us, just like Susie has done and continues to do—cancer be damned.
I looked at the women on the dance floor at Earlybirds. We were women who wore sequins and sparkles, who wore flannels and baggy t-shirts, who sat in the C-suite, who were mothers, who weren’t mothers but wanted to be, who had no desire to be mothers, who ran marathons, who started thriving businesses, who took care of aging parents, who packed lunch boxes, who mentored younger women, who volunteered at the local library, who pushed our friend’s wheelchair, who killed cockroaches in bathrooms because who else is going to, who have had abortions, who have had miscarriages, who have survived cancer, who still have cancer, who have been sexually assaulted, who have written books, who fly across the country to support friends, who take each other to doctor’s appointments, who manage up and manage down, who lead teams, who stay home from work when the kid is sick, who sign all the permission forms, who create the entire world. We were all dancing, not a high heel in sight.
We danced through the obligatory yet still life-affirming “Like a Prayer” (how is that song so damn good?) and until the wee hours of 10 p.m. And then we went home, wrapped in a cozy, sequined blanket of ’90s music, female friendship, solidarity, and communal joy, fortified to face another dystopian day.
As you set your 2025 intentions, might I suggest a dance party? Do it out loud, do it with girlfriends, and wear comfortable shoes.
Earlybird Club’s next dance party will be in Southern California on January 10 and 11.
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by Nikki Summer
Nikki Summer is a writer and consultant who lives with her tween son and her dog in Brooklyn. She writes about feminism, midlife, and parenting in her newsletter, We’re A Lot, and is working on a memoir about growing up half-Jewish in Christian County. She knows every line from Dirty Dancing and gets embarrassingly emotional when she hears the song “She’s Like the Wind.”
