Around 6:15 p.m. on a Friday earlier this month, women of a certain age began to trickle into Fete Music Hall, a venue in Providence, R.I. On the speakers, Whitney Houston was goading them to “feel the heat with somebody.”
But night was refusing to fall, and with a shaft of relentlessly cheerful sunlight pouring through the open door, the mood was less throbbing dance party, more middle-school dance. Apprehensive attendees struggled to figure out what to do with their bodies.
Kate Campo, 45, a mother of two and sales rep for a pharmaceutical company, had arrived in athleisure clothes, ready to sweat the night away. But so far she was still clinging to the edge of the dance floor. “You don’t think the music will be all ’80s, will it?,” Ms. Campo asked, surveying the scene.
This was Providence’s inaugural installment of Earlybirds Club, a roving dance party that takes place within the hours of 6 to 10 p.m. It was developed by two Gen Xers in Chicago who have been friends since their teens — Laura Baginski, a former magazine editor, and Susie Lee, a former makeup artist and skin care line founder — who came up with the concept in 2023 when they met for coffee after their 30th high school reunion.
They got to talking “quote-unquote million dollar ideas,” said Ms. Baginski, 49, who like many peers, was feeling stalled in her career. A music fanatic since childhood, she associated “most of the big milestones of my life” with music — and dancing, she added. Yet somehow she couldn’t get excited about dancing all night to EDM.
She told Ms. Lee, also 49, she’d always harbored a dream of hosting a dance party. It would be a safe, judgment-free zone geared toward women, trans and nonbinary people that would end before most clubs even open their doors, because — as the Earlybirds website now puts it — grown women “have things to do the next morning.” (Except the site uses a cruder word than “things”).
The very next day, Ms. Lee announced she had found a date, secured a venue — The Burlington, an unrepentantly dive-y spot in Chicago — and had even lined up a D.J.: her cousin Helean Lee, 40, who has played the music at all 25 Earlybirds parties to date. They have taken place in cities including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston. (Coming soon: Berkeley and Seattle.) All have sold out.
I was initiated to Earlybirds in March, in the gritty back room of the Parkside Lounge on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. That time around, the party was already full-tilt upon arrival — dance floor packed, bartenders hopping — yet I was as dubious as these early Providence arrivals. On paper, I was a prime EarlyBirder: 48; mother of two; tells anyone who will listen that I’m starved for dance parties (the kind involving other people).
And yet. Earlybirds. It called to mind meals at which teeth are optional. Was I ready for a dance party populated primarily by my peers, and up? Wasn’t there something a little … water aerobics about it?
Turns out I am powerless to resist the collective force of 175 women belting out Electric Light Orchestra’s happy-making anthem, “Mr.Blue Sky.” I was converted within minutes. The music consists of pop anthems you’ve known all your life, songs from the ’80s, ’90s and early aughts that, yes, have a little bit of that best-wedding-ever vibe. They’re not cool, and that’s why it works: The unifying nostalgia for the music of one’s youth, combined with the leave-it-all-on-the-mat energy of a crowd temporarily released from domestic captivity, conjured a long-lost magic for us all.
I felt a surge of my old dance floor mojo; in my head, at least, I was giving Jennifer Beals. Scanning the sweat-glazed foreheads and smile-plastered faces across the room, I realized that I was getting a lot more out of this than the simple dance fix I’d been craving. Some kind of collective, life-affirming energy had coalesced.
Forget, for a moment, the never-ending talk of perimenopause these days. The real thing no one tells you about midlife is that at some point, the weddings that felt so relentless and budget-draining in your late 20s and 30s are going to dry up. You might get invited to a fund-raiser here, a 50th birthday there, maybe the odd bat mitzvah, but these will be few and far between.
And if you’re like me, you might move out of New York City to a small town in, say, bookish, bucolic Western Massachusetts. While this small town has many charms, nightlife is not one of them. Which means, with the weight of child-rearing, mortgage paying, climate disaster and a terrifyingly polarized culture bearing down on you — just as your opportunities to dance begin to evaporate, you will find that you need them more than ever.
So on May 2, four friends from Massachusetts and I left home at 3:30 p.m. on a Friday afternoon to drive two hours to Providence, then back again, just to go dancing.
Which is to say, you can understand why I — and 199 other ticket-buyers — really needed this party to work. And around 7:30 p.m., after the golden hour had mercifully receded and our bodies, lightly lubricated by a round of cocktails, were finally filling the floor, I could feel it starting to happen:transcendence.
“I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks!” said Jodi Burke, a fresh-faced 50-year-old, as she bound past me. She was wearing a short, zip-up jumpsuit she said she had picked up during her child’s recent college tour. Marveling at the crowd, she added, “All the dancers are so polite!”
Holly Ferriera, a 55-year-old artist and belly-dancing teacher who wore a fascinator of her own design, said she typically goes dancing at gay clubs, where “you can just be yourself.” She echoed the thoughts of many attendees: “You need space to be free.”
Elizabeth Fleck, 38, a real estate agent and, according to her best friend, Christen Poole, 40, a “single mom badass queen,” said that dance was a form of therapy, though one usually practiced at home, with noise-canceling headphones, after her children’s bedtime. The friends wore matching constellations of silver face glitter and sheer T-shirt dresses scattered with black stars.
Ann Ochiltree, a 43-year-old director of marketing, recalled the many ways she has tried to find a place to dance in recent years, including taking a Bachata Latin class. “But that lacks free-range expression,” she said. “I just want to be able to move.”
Around 8:30 p.m., Ms. Baginski took to the mic to welcome the crowd, and to offer a brief homage to her co-founder. “By this age, you’ve seen some” things, she said. And Susie Lee has seen more than most. She recently stopped traveling to the parties, for the same reason that motivated her to get Earlybirds off the ground virtually overnight: She’s battling stage IV breast cancer. Via email, Ms. Lee called Earlybirds “a safe space to be seen and heard for women, who are generally the caretakers.”
When Ms. Baginski shared this news with the crowd, there was a collective gasp, followed by a silence. But it’s not a buzzkill. As I’ve now seen twice, the shock gives the crowd a call to arms — deeply felt here — to dance harder, let it all go, squeeze every drop of joy out of this.
Beth Weinmann, who lives in Chicago, is what you might call a frequent flier; she said she’s “lost count” of how many Earlybirds she’s attended. As a cancer survivor with a severely autistic child for whom she’s a full-time caretaker, Ms. Weinmann, 46, attends Earlybirds “to leave all of that at the door for a few hours, and go home feeling a little bit lighter and more free.”
By the time the night’s penultimate song, Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” came on, it felt like divine providence: This crowd was ecstatic. The only person still seated was a woman who came in a wheelchair with a broken foot. (She’d tripped over her cat — yes, really — but was determined not to miss this night out with her girlfriends.)
Even Kate Campo, the ’80s music skeptic, was acting out prayer hands and reaching to the heavens.
I’ve logged lots of time in female-dominated spaces that feel a little prickly (work meetings), or brainy (book clubs) or dutiful (the P.T.O.). Earlybirds, by contrast, is all the sleepovers, summer camps and bachelorettes of my youth, but concentrated and distilled — purified of all mean girl behavior, insecurity, exclusion, competition. And significantly sweatier.
By 10 p.m., I’d danced so hard, my legs felt leaden. But my heart was so full, I could have gone on forever.
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