Congratulations Disco Orphan!

You didn’t ask to be an orphan, but you sure took to it well. When you were like three you spent most of your time running around, delivering papers to various locals for pennies on the hour. That kept you fed and kept you in contact with other orphans, but it wasn’t really a long term thing you wanted to do for the rest of your life. So by the time you hit six you had moved on to stealing bits of fruit and tiny valuables from shops and tourists and giving them to an old man with a beard who would sometimes hit you and sometimes give you food.

That kept you going until you were twelve and you realized that the old man with a beard was actually a pedophile who was waiting for you to get old enough to “be his type.” You turned the police on to his little operation and moved on, which meant being homeless for several days until you, snowblind and starving, wandered into Chicago’s last standing discotheque.

Discotheque people aren’t like other people: they welcomed you with open arms and let you stay in their discotheque. They fed you disco-biscuits and disco-soup until you were strong and then they asked if you wanted to stay and learn the ways of the disco.

You didn’t have anything better to do, so you said yes.

Over the next decade you learned how to dance every dance in the disco handbook. Your hips learned the rhythms of disco, your legs came to understand the purity of the steps and strides that were expected of them. You learned to hustle, to do other dances we’re not familiar with because, like most people, we stopped paying attention to disco decades ago and, as a result, most of what we see of your future is just a mass of random images that make no sense to us.

But they’ll all make perfect sense to you, and they’ll give your life a sense of purpose that it never had before. It’ll feel like it’s all building to something, something tremendous and momentous that will be threatening to collapse the dam of your senses at every turn and let in the blessed, overwhelming waters of enlightenment. You’ll know peace for the first time in a life where you’ve only been dealt bad hands, and it’ll be wonderful.

Alas, nothing can last though. Three days ago an evil urban developer approached the owner the discotheque’s property and offered them seven times the property’s value in order to purchase it from them and turn it into high-class new apartments that could only ever be occupied by people who have never even heard of disco. Your disco-parents will be crestfallen – they’ll have only one option if they want to save the discotheque: they’ll need to have a disco-extravaganza and raise eight times the property’s value so they can buy the evil urban developer out.

Obviously, things haven’t been too lucrative at the discotheque of late, but having been saved by the power of disco you’ll know that it is not only capable of changing worlds, that it also must be preserved if the world is to remain worth anything at all. So you’ll go out on the street with a boom box and start disco-ing your ass off on a daily basis.

You’ll disco up and down the streets, boogying, beginning today, from the South Side to Evanston. By the time you’re done Chicago will be pulsing with the power of disco – it will have remembered the fun, the cocaine and the ridiculous clothing that people used to wear without the slightest measure of shame. Chicago will, for one brilliant day, have remembered the magic of disco.

You’ll stumble your way back to the discotheque late, late, late this evening. Your feet will be bleeding in your wing tipped shoes, your bell-bottoms will be tattered by the exertions of your dance. You’ll attempt to do a little boogie as you enter, to announce your presence, but you’ll just collapse into the arms of your disco-father. Behind you a crowd will be surging, struggling to enter the doors of the discotheque for the first time in decades. Your discotheque will easily pull in the money they need and then some. You’ll spend the evening sitting in a chair, watching others fill the dance floor for a change. For the first time in your life you’ll feel like you gave something to someone instead of taking it. It’ll be a good feeling.

Congratulations Disco Orphan!