Two minutes after I got off the phone with Dustin last night, he called me back, excited and half-yelling:
“Nick, get the van! We’re DJing tonight at my school– they don’t have a DJ!”
I grabbed a nice shirt, threw on my shoes, yelled to my brother to jump in the car, and drove the van over to Dustin’s house. He had already started bringing the equipment downstairs from his bedroom and had most of it in his living room.
“Just throw it in the van, it doesn’t matter where it goes. It’s almost 6:30, and the dance starts at 7:00!”
We arrived at Dustin’s school 15-20 minutes later. As we pulled in, a swarm of students and parents enveloped our van, cheering with appreciation that we were able to make it on such short notice. Dustin hung out the window, yelling, “Okay everyone, everything goes in, just put it by the stage.”
Everyone brought the equipment in fairly quickly, and I parked the van while Dustin and my brother started to set up. When I ran in, I saw that they had the speaker stands and the light stand set up. I started setting up the console, and it was not long before we had all our equipment set up.
At 7:10, we started the music, which was welcomed by cheering from the crowd. It was time to get the dance started; less than 10 minutes late was not bad at all.
Here are some observations:
- There were a lot of requests. Seriously, every 2 minutes someone would walk over and request a song. This was perfectly fine, but in many cases we would tell people, “We already have that song in the playlist, and it’s coming up in 15 minutes.”
- The dance was 2 and a half hours, which is just about as long as most of the dances we do, but the time seemed to pass really quickly.
- We still had the equipment and the playlist ready from last weekend’s dance at my school. The music was already fairly organized, so we just had to adapt the music selection to the middle school audience.
As we were packing up, Dustin and I were talking to the dance’s organizer. She told us that when she realized that she didn’t have a DJ, she was thinking through her possibilities and thought of sending her husband to bring her stereo from home, but someone suggested that she call us instead. She later wrote in an email to us:
“It says a lot about you that you were willing to react so quickly to help the school and your fellow students.”
Dustin replied, “Hopefully all the students had as great a time as we did!”
