Dancing at Dawn

I’ve wanted to do this since I first heard about it back in early 2015….as their website says “DAYBREAKER is a social movement that gets people together for dancing during the morning hours. ” I’m on their email list and get notifications every time there’s an event, have forwarded the info to my niece in SF, daughter-in-law in NYC and friend in Paris, but I’ve never been in the right city at the right time…until a few weeks ago.

I got up early and took the 1/2 hour subway ride over to the west side of Manhattan, to the Highline Ballroom. What a cool venue and the vibe, as you can imagine, is electrifying as you wait in line with a bunch of other enthusiastic morning people just waiting to start their day on a happy note!

C’mon how much fun does that sound to just dance unabashedly before you go to work…..with a few hundred people?!

You have two choices….sign up for just dancing from 7-9am or include the pre-yoga at 6am. I don’t do yoga, so opted to dance from 7-9. It’s only $25 and some of the money is donated to charity. This event, for the first time, was sponsored by AFLAC and over $7000. was donated to children’s cancer research. It also included a song and dance from multi-talented Matthew Morrison…you know him from Glee; the Grammy nominated band Kaleo (never heard of them before this)…and, yes, the Aflac duck made an appearance too! There were also some refreshments to partake of from some food sponsors, so we all enjoyed Kombucha, water, some frozen confection, to name a few. After talking to a few people on my way in who had been many times, apparently most are held outdoors, on rooftops, in parks, on boats…so this was much more of a concert-y vibe than most. I thought it was a blast!

I started on the ground floor for the “dance through the decades” theme and then noticed there was a balcony. Being short it’s always more fun to be on the balcony, so you can enjoy all the action. Above, you can see how it wasn’t that crowded at 7am on the floor…..

…and it got more crowded as time went on (Matthew Morrison above)

It was one of the founder’s birthday, so crowd surfing was in order! This was towards the end.

The Aflac duck took the stage for the paparazzi….

….and there were babies with protective headphones!

I had a blast and can’t wait to go again…hopefully in LA next! As they say in their email sign-off

“…with love and mischief”

My sign-off is pretty great too….

You cannot direct the wind, but you can adjust the sails!

 

2 Comments

    1. There’s one on Valentine’s Day that I’m not attending, but sign up your email and you’ll get the notifications! I’m hoping this summer, because they’re mid-week, which is hard for me to attend. Yay…let’s do it together!

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