Ope Pardon, No. 30: Parole Party

Last December, I told a man that clubs “weren’t really my thing” and he immediately got rather irrationally combative about how that just meant I hadn’t found the right club yet because, in Paris, there was a club for everyone.

No, I thought, I don’t like crowds, techno or social events that start after 10pm. I don’t like clubs.

Several weeks later, in early January, I was talking with two friends about how — goddammit — didn’t I wonder if he might have been right. I did miss dancing, and one typically dances in clubs, so maybe I was being too dismissive of the Paris club scene. Perhaps 2023 would be the year I found the club for me.

What I wanted to find was a little harder for me to articulate: Music with a good beat, music I knew, music I could sing along to. Genre I was relatively open: Pop of any decade, rap, reggaeton, afrobeat. (As for the club itself: preferably no cover, in my neighborhood, and not too crowded.)

My friend, and soon-to-be co-conspirator, put it much more succinctly: We were looking for music with words.

It took a couple weeks after that for our operation to get off the ground, during which time I did a disconcerting amount of research, followed a dozen Instagram accounts of potential venues, started a shared iPhone note and polled every date, coworker or otherwise Paris-residing person I encountered. (I have never been accused of having any chill when I set my mind to something.)

I even gave it a name — Dance Dance Resolution, which I thought I came up with myself but I now feel sure came from the particular recess of my brain that stores sitcom jokes. But despite antithetical taste in music, we were kindred spirits with Jason Mendoza: We too resolved to dance.

The first bar we went to was called Le Carrousel and we knew it might be a little more French than we wanted. (Our hopes of finding an Anglophone oasis were still high at that point.)

Here are my notes from that night:

• Pros: 98% French music; the complete center of a Venn diagram between [our friends’ playlist of songs that make French people lose their minds] and the songs my coworkers sing at karaoke; closes before 2am so can still catch the metro home

• Cons: 98% French music; men a bit too on the prowl; not really room to DANCE dance; 10 euro gin-tos

And so it went. Throughout February, March and April, we averaged maybe 1-2 dance nights a month, sometimes limited by the clubs’ schedules (we tried to target specific ‘80s or ‘90s/00s theme nights), sometimes felled by the classic folly of lingering on pre-drinks too long. I kept notes, sometimes taken on the metro home or the next morning, sometimes embedded screenshots of text messages sent from the dance floor. The rest of our friend group provided rotational reinforcements, but enthusiasm understandably wavered.

At the start of May, a much-anticipated ‘90s/00s night dealt morale a devastating blow. The DJ very well may have understood the assignment, but it was neither our ‘90s nor our ‘00s that he invoked that night. Afterward, I stood on the street and told my friend I thought maybe such a dance spot simply does not exist in Paris, and then I listened to a Spotify playlist of all the songs I wish he had played on my walk home.

But the next day, when I went to record the calamity in our iPhone note, I was reminded of all the places we still had left to try and silly adjectives each had been assigned to describe why. I was all the way back in.

Since then, like anyone who has made a New Year’s resolution, let it fall to the wayside in late spring, then recommitted with unprecedented enthusiasm when summer arrives, we’ve really gotten our steps in these past three weeks.

Most recently, we went to a bar that had been described by a friend of a friend as an “American grindfest.” Thrilled as I was that the DJ played 30 seconds of a Vince Staples (!!) song, he simply refused to string together two songs in a row that you could dance — let alone grind! — to.

So we decided then to go back to the bar from the first night. It had, bizarrely, transformed into a neon green covered Hennessy pop-up for fashion week and when we walked in, there were maybe 12 people in the whole bar, they were serving the best boozy slushie I have ever had in my life and within minutes the DJ played “Pony.” It was, in other words, a dream.

But then the bar closed and we didn’t want to go home, so we went to one more spot. If I recall correctly, they played two songs with words the two hours we were there: The first, if I recall, was “Sweet Dreams”; the second was “Tainted Love.” I did not have a voice when we left the club, but I think that had more to do with shouting about the man who looked like Alan Ruck than it did singing along because, well, there were no words to sing along to.

For the past two months, I have been doing what’s called desensitization training with my dog. It’s a thing therapists do with humans too. The idea is that routine, regulated exposure to a fear or anxiety eventually minimizes its effects until you are, as you might have deduced, desensitized to it. You don’t go over the comfort level threshold during the training and gradually they or you acclimate to whatever it was that was causing them or you distress.

I bring this up because after last weekend, I was left feeling less like our DDR endeavor would end with the discovery of a magical parole party and more like it was actually leading us — or at least me — towards techno desensitization. I don’t want to say that I have given up on finding what I am looking for, vis-a-vis dancing, in Paris. But if Jack can be trained to enjoy solitude, maybe I too can be trained to enjoy music without words through the gradual exposure to it at each club we go to.

Our list of spots to try remains extensive and grows with each new person we introduce to the campaign. We are developing a short list of places we like enough to go back and we are having fun while we do it.

But there is, for me, an undeniable undercurrent of compromise. Compromise is, I guess, what assimilation is all about. Deciding what parts of yourself you are willing to give up to live where you have chosen to live. Deciding what is, ultimately, good enough and whether good enough is, in fact, enough.

Which is another way of saying that the goalposts have moved since January, the basket has been lowered.

I cite the beginning of the serenity prayer more than anyone who has never actually done the 12 steps has any business citing it, because it is frequently, I genuinely believe, very applicable to my life, even where dancing is concerned.

So on that note I say:

God grant me the serenity to accept the clubs that don’t play music with words,

The courage to find the clubs that do,

And a shared iPhone note to remember the difference.

P.S. I thought a lot about whether it was weird or inappropriate or just click-baity to use parole in the subject line when this all has nothing to do with prison but then I went down a rabbit hole about the word parole and forgot about my qualms.

See, at first I thought it was just One of Those Things that the English word for “provisional release of a prisoner on good behavior before the end of their sentence” was the same as the French word for “word” or lyric — kind of like how with the English word for two-words-smooshed-together is the French word for coat rack. But THEN (according to Google) I learned that the English word for “provisional release of a prisoner on good behavior” actually comes FROM the French word for “word” because, back in the day, Old French parole meant more of a formal promise, and what is being released on parole if not giving the carceral authorities your formal word that you will behave yourself whilst out and about in society.

The more you know!