Hosting a Dance Party After September 11th, 2001

My experience of September 11th, 2001, was bizarre. My girlfriend at the time was in the middle of nowhere, on a ship and completely cut off from the world. I was working a morning shift at a video store doing inventory when we heard the news and everyone dropped what they were doing to watch a terrible looking feed of the local NBC affiliate. When the second plane hit and it became apparent that this was not an accident, the boss sent us home for the day to be with our families.

The next several days were spent just like everyone else in the country, glued to CNN and waiting to see what might happen next. What happened next for me was a call from my radio boss. At that time, I was still only a part time employee at Mix 96.1 FM in the Quad Cities of Iowa and Illinois. But, I did have my own show, Retro Saturday Night, a disco dance party where I entertained a surprisingly large audience of boomers who still loved The Bee Gees, Gloria Gaynor and K.C and the Sunshine Band.

The show was a weekly party soundtrack and I had the welcome responsibility of choosing all of the music for the show, a responsibility that would be the first step in the evolution of my career from part to full time. But I wasn’t thinking about that responsibility when my radio boss called me on September 12th, 2001 to tell me that we were still going to have Retro Saturday Night the following weekend. I was dumbfounded. I’m not one to defy a boss, especially one whom I respected above all others as I did this boss, but I could not believe what he was telling me.

How could I possibly go on the air and play disco music? How could I host a dance party just days after the greatest tragedy in American history. Certainly no one was going to want to listen to me goof on disco tracks, ramp up to Disco Duck, or crack wise about leisure suits and bell bottoms. My schtick, though very fun before September 11th, 2001, seemed like the least essential thing in the world to me after September 11th, 2001. I may have been thousands of miles from New York City, but all of our hearts and minds were there and it felt downright alien to pretend anything different.

Our radio station spent three days after the events of September 11th, 2001, simulcasting our NewsTalk station which had dropped regular programming to carry 24/7 updates from ABC News Radio. It wasn’t until Friday that our stations had returned to full time music programming and I was going to be on Saturday night playing disco songs and urging people to Get Down On It with Kool and the Gang or put on your Boogie Shoes like K.C and the Sunshine Band.

Suddenly, things that had never occurred to me before became edgy choices that had to be weighed and measured in new ways. First and foremost, could I play the song Staying Alive? I know that in hindsight that seems silly but with thousands of people dead in New York City, was it appropriate to play a song called Staying Alive? Every lyric of every song gained an importance and weight that they never had before as I worried about causing more harm for any apparent carelessness.

To illustrate the odd tightrope that we were walking, just down the hall from me on our local Oldies station, KUUL FM, they panicked and pulled the song Leaving on a Jet Plane by The Mamas and the Papas out of concern for offending audiences or merely reminding them of what had just happened in New York. That sounds ridiculous today, but in the moment, sensitivities being what they were, it was the right thing to do. Songs about planes or flying came off of every playlist in our 6 radio station cluster. Corporate ownership even sent a list of songs not to play for the foreseeable future.

But that list didn’t arrive until the Monday after my show aired. Thus, when I started that Saturday night, September 15th, 2001, I didn’t have a handbook. I didn’t know if I should go into my time warp schtick, pretending the show was actually emanating from the late 1970s, or if I should address the horrific elephant in the room. I was several years into my career, I’d been on the air when Princess Di had been killed and the night of the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics bombing, I knew how to handle a serious on air presentation but those incidents didn’t really compare to the massive horror of September 11th.

At 7 Pm Central time, I cracked the microphone with a quiver in my voice and no music bed to hide behind. I was out of character and speaking from the heart. I spoke for a minute about how strange it felt to be hosting this show in this moment and how my heart still ached liked everyone else. Then I made the case that in spite of how we were all feeling, we needed to soldier on. We needed to try and keep going amid the sadness and if this silly little disco show provided even a moment of escape, maybe that’s a good thing.

The response to that was incredible. My regular listeners flooded the phones with requests and several thanked me for doing the show. We laughed which surprised us all and we shared the recognition that joy may not have felt right given all that was happening but it was desperately needed. That night, together, we escaped, we danced, we laughed and we did it while never forgetting why these feelings felt so strange. If there were detractors or people who didn’t think it was appropriate to do the show they must have changed the channel or kept it to themselves because every call that night was encouraging, thankful and filled with poignant mixed emotions. The desire for joy crossed paths with the guilt of wanting joy when so many others could not possibly feel it.

The moment was kinetic, it was exciting, it was sad, but it was kind of beautiful. The experience of that show formed me in many ways, it brought forward my value in compassion and my desire to make people happy and it was the first time I realized how no one really knows what the right thing to do in any given situation really is. Had it been up to me, I would have programmed something other than a disco dance party but I would have also missed out on this incredible moment of cathartic, shared emotion, a feeling of relief that didn’t compete with our sadness, just gave us a break from it for a little bit.

It is something that I will never forget, how so many feelings can cross paths at once and each have their place. Sadness, anger, joy, relief, catharsis, all of these poignant emotions flowed through me and the people who were listening and calling that night. No one forgot about what was happening in New York City and we all made sure that it was foremost in our minds even as this silly, silly music helped us relax and breathe for a moment. I was still careful with the playlist but I needn’t have worried as I had more requests than I knew what to do with, I let the audience carry the night.

The lesson I took away from that night, there is no one way to grieve, no one way to process unimaginable loss. There is nothing wrong with being sensitive and taking care not to hurt people's feelings. You don't know everything and you can't prepare for everything that happens. I learned that just because something feels insignificant, like a little disco radio show, it might be significant to someone, it might just be the comfortable, familiar thing they need in that moment. And I learned that feeling even a little bit of joy amid unimaginable tragedy is not just possible, for some it's necessary.