THE LESSON

LET’S START WITH WHAT the women are like. Because above all else, you need to prepare yourself for the women.

First off is the bride, and I’ll give you a for-instance. Last week my fiancée went out with a big group of her friends, plus my mother and her mother and her two sisters, and one of her sisters’ sisters-in-law, to pick out her dress. I said to her, “All those opinions? All those screeching voices telling you what to do? You are in for a world of hurt in that scenario.”

She put her hand on my arm in that way she does — she thinks it’s a soothing thing to do, but to me it’s just patronizing — and said, “How about I handle my end of things the way I want to. You are in charge of the rental tuxedos and the music. That’s all you have to do.” Implying that my job — our job — is easy, that I only have to entertain an entire banquet hall full of inebriated wedding guests and give them the most ultimate night of their lives. When she says stuff like that and uses that tone with me, I get a pang diagonally above my heart that makes me think negative thoughts such as, Maybe our impending marriage is a mistake. It’s as if she doesn’t understand me at all.

Nah, but I’m just kidding. I love her more than anything. You got a girlfriend?

Then there are the bridesmaids. Actually, the bridesmaids aren’t usually much of a hassle because they’re too busy boo-hooing about how fat they look in their stupid matching dresses that they didn’t get to pick out by themselves. They all end up hating the bride for dictating what they have to wear, but they distract themselves by talking about her behind her back and rubbing up against the best man. Even if he’s married. Especially if he’s married. There is something about two people publicly promising to love each other forever that brings out the lowest form of dogshit in everybody else.

Next up — okay, let’s press the pause button for a minute because you seem a little distracted to me. You keep checking your phone, and meanwhile I’m imparting this information on a you-need-to-know basis. Think about it — if I was to walk away right now, leaving you and your limited skill set alone with all these people, they would eat you alive. And your fancy mobile device there would be like, “Oh shit, what do we do now?” Technology can only take you so far, and if you want to do this, you need to cultivate real-world knowledge. What’s the Internet going to tell you that I don’t already know? The answer is nothing. All right, so you’re taking notes on your phone. That’s good. If you’re taking notes, that’s fine. We can proceed.

As soon as the reception starts, you need to scan the crowd for troublemakers. See that woman over there, the one with the spiky hair and the feathers on her dress? What does she think she is, a bird or something? See how she can’t sit still, how she’s squirming in her chair? What? Aha, she’s laying an egg, that’s funny. Picking up on the bird motif, that’s clever. You have to be quick on your feet in this business, I’m impressed.

But you need to listen very closely to me now. That is a woman who wants to dance, but she’s the worst kind — she only wants to dance to her music. You can always spot her because she’s straight out of the textbook. Not a real textbook, no. More like a textbook I made up in my mind. She’ll be late thirties to early forties. She’ll be drunk, and will get drunker. She’ll have short hair, or medium-short hair, with sort of spiky bits or parts that flip out at the sides. She’ll think she’s cuter than she is. She’ll believe she’s going to charm you. And yeah, she’ll be charming at first. Hell, she is cute. But not as cute as she thinks she is. She doesn’t have much in the boob department. Her heels aren’t as high as the other girls’ heels.

Moving right along — and things move fast here, so you need to keep up — the first ingredient of a primo playlist is timing. You want to get the old people out dancing before everybody else because they’re going to be gone before everybody else. Yes, right, gone in every sense of the word. Again with the comedy, I like it. But you need to focus on what I’m telling you. Ideally the old folks go home thinking — or saying, which is even better, but old people generally aren’t big talkers so you settle for what you can get — I had a good time. That was some kind of good time I had, yessir.

Timing-wise also, you do not want to blow your best material too fast. Look around — these guests are still eating dessert. If I played the new Beyoncé single right now, the majority of them are not getting up because they’re neck-deep in chocolate mousse. You might get a couple of diehards on the dance floor, but that’s it. Then you know what happens? Somebody’s going to come up to you later in the evening and want that very same single again. Which puts you in the difficult position of saying you already played that song, but the guest wants to hear it again because now there are actually people dancing. And you’re supposed to make the guests happy, so basically if you allow that chain of events to unfold, you’re fucked.

If the bride has done her homework — and trust me, she’ll do it — she will be intimately familiar with your style. She didn’t just pick some random DJ off the street. She hired you because she wants you. Sure, she’ll have her own songs lined up for the big dances, for the bride-and-groom, bride-and-father, groom-and-mother — what, you seriously think he picks that one? — and she might have a handful of do-not-plays, but otherwise the success or failure of her nuptial celebration is in your hands. And all brides want to believe that their party will go down in history as the best one ever, just like they’re all under the grand delusion that stuffing themselves into satin and lace and sequins will magically transform them into supermodels on their special day.

When my fiancée was a little girl, she wanted to be a princess but her best friend was way prettier than she was. The boys at school fought each other over who got to walk her best friend home, and at one point so many boys were stealing so many flowers for this girl that people started staking out their gardens, hiding behind bushes with skipping ropes. That shit never goes away. Now my fiancée wears those fitness shoes that turn normal walking into more of an intense exercise. She says they’re supposed to give her “fantastic legs, spectacularly lifted buns, and a stronger core.” She’s strolling around thinking she’s getting this amazing workout, but in reality she’s been duped by a clever ad in a women’s magazine and her burning desire for spectacularly lifted buns.

I’m thinking to myself, how much can her buns possibly be lifted, anyway? I enjoy their current height fine already. Are these shoes going to strap her buns into a jet pack and zoom them into the stratosphere? What if her already high-enough buns ended up on her shoulders? That would just be bizarre.

The next playlist ingredient, which is also sort of the first, so you’ve got two first ingredients, is variety. Imagine this scenario: You go to Applebee’s, you get seated comfortably in a booth, and you don’t so much notice the music as you notice how it’s enhancing your dining experience.

I want to meet the guy who puts those chain-restaurant mixes together. He’s got to please everybody. Young, old, medium-young, medium-old, kids, babies. How does he make his selections? Does he conduct polls? How does he know what will appeal to the general population? We’re all sitting there, tapping our toes in between bites and feeling excellent about the state of the world’s affairs, and it’s all thanks to one man. Pretty incredible. Of course, our job is actually harder in many respects. He’s dealing strictly with ambience, whereas we have to set the mood and bring the noise.

Requests are a whole different animal. With teeth. Sharp ones, exactly. So okay, everybody likes what they like, right? And everybody’s tastes are subjective. Objective? One of the two. You know what I mean.

A good DJ will always take requests, but you have to take them judiciously. Say Miss Feathers over there is begging for The Cure. Chicks like her always ask for the fucking Cure. You make her feel heard, like she has something to look forward to, but you make her wait for it. You want her to go nuts on the dance floor — and hopefully she can move — when “Friday I’m in Love” comes on. You want her shouting, “That’s my song! He’s playing my song!”

But there’s a delicate balance. If you make her wait too long, she’ll get pissed off and start badmouthing you to her friends, and possibly the wedding couple, about how you aren’t taking requests and you were rude to her, blah blah blah. On the other hand, if it gets so she thinks she can just order whatever song she wants, whenever she wants it, then you have surrendered the reins and allowed the public to hijack your program. And that is a sorry situation that you one hundred per cent do not want to find yourself in.

It’s all about wielding influence. People see the name of our company on a wedding invitation — because that’s a clause in our contract, that our name has to appear there — and they immediately think, Whoa, this is going to be a classy affair. So you better make damn sure your shoelaces are tied and you’re not wearing an inappropriate belt buckle. This one guy who used to work for us? He showed up at a reception wearing a belt buckle in the shape of a King Cobra, all coiled up to strike. It was pretty mind-blowing, but I was like, “What the fuck? This is a fucking wedding.” Put that majestic eagle or howling wolf in a drawer for another day. This is an occasion for fragrant blossoms and shit floating in big vases with rainbow-coloured rocks at the bottom.

The next weapon in your arsenal is showmanship. Do you ever have that dream where you’re supposed to give a presentation, and it’s on something really boring, like sustainable development, but you’ve somehow devised a way to make it interesting? Like maybe you’ve got Powerpoints of Herman cartoons that relate to the subject? I love Herman, he’s so fucking deadpan. But when you arrive, you realize you’ve left the cartoons at home, and all that’s left are the boring parts, like about sharing food with poor people and all that? You don’t know how you’re going to get through this thing, and there’s a huge audience, but you have to do it — it’s your turn. That’s the approach I take with DJing.

Dreams are crazy things, right? Last night I dreamed that I ran into the most popular guy from my high school, and I told him what I did for a living. Do you know what that means? It means I’ve made it. There’s Shane Terpstra, just walking along, and I recognize him but he doesn’t recognize me. I had to tell him, “Dude, it’s me!” And he grabbed my lapels and pulled me in and said, “Looking good, man.” The next thing he said was, “What are you doing with yourself these days?” His eyes were these crazy red slits, like a snake’s eyes, that’s the only thing that was weird about him. I said, “I’m a wedding DJ, Shane. I play music during the best moment of other people’s lives.” And he started to cry these gushy red tears of blood out of his crazy red slit snake eyes, it was pretty freaky, actually, and he was so ashamed by what he was doing with his own life that he wouldn’t even tell me. Or maybe he was a vacuum-cleaner salesman, something shitty like that. Anyway, it was a good dream.

The bottom line is you have to look good. Everybody wants their wedding to be a YouTube sensation now, so they film the whole thing — not just the ceremony. I’m talking the receiving line, cocktails, dinner, dancing, all of it. In case the head table breaks into a surprise choreographed number, or the barten-ders start juggling bottles, or the servers form a human pyramid and it turns out they’re from the cast of Cirque du Soleil. Or the groom slaps a Velcro target on the bride’s back and hands out Velcro bow-and-arrow sets to the ushers and tells them to “Fire at will, gentlemen.” Or the maid of honour starts throwing cupcakes at her kids and screaming, “I can’t enjoy comedy anymore because I pee when I laugh now, thanks to you idiots!” Or the twelve-year-old ring bearer drops acid for the first time and the next thing you know, he’s naked with bleeding fork holes all over his skin. Nobody wants to miss that shit.

This means at any given moment you could be caught on camera and plastered across the Web for eternity, so you better look like you’re standing there thinking, I have been to a thousand weddings, but this one is truly special, and the love that these two people share is absolutely, positively going to last forever. It is the purest love I have ever witnessed in all my many years as a wedding DJ.

I have a few tricks up my sleeve to keep me in the moment. I transport myself to childhood and remember the smell of creosote from when I used to explore the train tracks by my parents’ house, and I’d leave a penny out to get flattened. When I picked up that thin slice of metal afterwards I’d marvel at the weight of the train, how heavy it must have been, to do that to metal! But then occasionally the memory trick backfires and I’ll think about the time Tito Bacchiochi — who we all called “Tits-o” but never to his face — held me down on the tracks, and Shane Terpstra and some other kids were standing around laughing and I could hear the engine rumbling in the distance. Tits-o jammed his elbow into my neck and said I’d be just like that old hobo who fell asleep drunk in the same spot and got run over. We’d all heard about it on the news. When they found him the next day, he was still alive but his left arm and leg were gone and he kept yelling, “Where are my cigarettes?” So actually certain memories are not the ideal ones to bring back, and they’re a bad example of what I’m trying to illustrate here.

Oh yeah, there’s plenty of perks. The free meals are pretty sweet. You get to take all sorts of free crap home. Our cupboards are full of shot glasses, mugs, vases, corkscrews, salt and pepper shakers, all with the bride and groom’s names and the date they were married. Some of them also have a line about the love that was forged and strengthened that day — Forever and always, we have a few of those. Two hearts united in one soul, that kind of thing. Or, It’s not you, it’s me. No, haha, I’m just kidding about that one. That wouldn’t have made sense at the time.

Back to what I was saying about requests. Last week I played in the Veils ’n‘ Cummerbunds Body Shocker Regional Finals, and I got a special Honourable Mention Crown for mass appeal. Not to say that I need an award to tell me what I’m worth. It was nice to finally get one, sure, but prizes don’t mean anything in the overall scheme of things. I am widely considered to be the people’s DJ. Which is of course exactly where I want to be, it’s the biggest compliment you can get. That’s why I’m here training you. I take on all the newbies because I know the ropes. I made the ropes, wove them out of whatever material goes into rope. String or whatever.

Anyway, at the contest, nobody had any requests for me, I was that good. I mean, they were all the DJs’ wives and girlfriends so they knew the score. Except my fiancée was busy that night with wedding stuff, and that’s fine. Priorities, right? In any case, I had them shaking everything God gave them, and then some. Ten DJs from the municipality, and out of all of them, I was the crowd pleaser. I knew what to play and when. I had my list. I had the songs lined up that went best together, and I had a full-on smile stuck to my face the whole time.

One part of the competition was for showcasing our MC skills. Because as a wedding DJ, sometimes you are called upon to MC, which I personally think is really sad. These people can’t even dig up an uncle or brother-in-law or distant cousin who knows them decently well to tell some mushy anecdotes about them, so they have to hire a stranger to say those things? And yet that was the section where I got extra points. They said my MC work was so heartfelt, it was as if I had known this imagi-nary couple their entire lives. You want to know how I did that? It was because I was talking about my own relationship, and what we have together and all the romantic things we used to do together. When I talked about how the fake wedding couple met, for instance, I thought about when I first laid eyes on my fiancée. She started working in my local video store, and I literally had to rub my eyes when I saw her, she was that hot. Before I got up the guts to introduce myself, I used to drop little notes for her through the return slot, to capture her heart. It creeped her out at first but I guess it worked in the end, right?

Because I was thinking about all this, at one point I had real, actual tears in my eyes, and that’s what the judges said put me over the edge. That’s what won me a beautiful pair of Bose headphones fused onto a rhinestone tiara with flashing lights on it that needed a battery to work but nobody had a battery at the time, so I didn’t get to see the full effect until I got home. Which, let me say, was totally fucking awesome.

I put my Honourable Mention Crown on the mantle over our fireplace, so my fiancée would see it when she got home. She said it was nice, and moved it into our bedroom closet because she said it would be safer there. Which made sense, I guess.

Did you see what just happened there? How Miss Feathers sidled over to ever so casually peruse our binders? She’ll be back. At first she’ll be all sweet. She’ll act like she’s your buddy, like she can read your mind, like you and her are a team.

But you are the one with the power. You’ve got all these partygoers waiting on you to press Play. All these couples star-ing into each other’s eyes and secretly comparing their own relationship to the bride and groom’s. Why doesn’t he put his arm around me like that? Why doesn’t she look at me like that? Why doesn’t he bring me flowers anymore? I thought we were more compatible. I thought we’d be having way more sex. Isn’t he supposed to love all of me, all the time? Why didn’t she say yes right away? Why did she have to stand there and think about it for thirty fucking seconds? Fuck this, I’m going out for a smoke and I’m never coming back.

But then you bring them back, because your music is so fucking good, it’s irresistible to their jaded ears.

What you need to do with women like Miss Feathers is you need to shut them down. Pronto. Otherwise they’ll keep coming back for more. So you grant her the first one or two tunes she asks for, and then nothing after that. Trust me on this one, or she’ll be leaning over your list at one a.m., breathing hard through her nose and going, “What’s the name of that famous Bon Jovi song? The one everyone likes to dance to?” She secretly thinks she could do your job, better than you, even. She likes to think she’s doing you a favour by telling you what music people want to hear. She thinks she has the finger on the pulse of humanity, but she doesn’t know shit.

It’s like how my fiancée wanted me to bring the phone book back into vogue. Like bringing sexy back, but with the phone book. “Look,” she said, “it’s got all these pages, with everything you could ever want. There’s important services and not-so-important ones. If you have a need, you pick up this phone book and it will find a way to satisfy that need.” Unlike our relationship, is what she meant to say, under all her rampant phone-book glorification.

And here’s the crucial part of the exchange. She asked me, “Are you advertising your DJ services in the phone book? Because if not, you should be.”

I know you’re going to say, “Hey, chill out, she was only trying to help.” But if you pay attention, I think you’ll come out on my side of the fence on this.

I said, “Nobody uses the phone book anymore. It’s an antiquated medium.”

She said, “The past is coming back. Everything old is new again. People want retro.” And at that point she suggested I look up “satisfy” in the phone book and see what they had to say. “They” as in the phone-book people. Who could read our minds, apparently.

She told me then that her deepest desire was for me to be the man she first met at the video store and later kissed in line at the go-kart track, who had hovered his hand over her back, reiki-style, or shiatsu or whatever, in any case, without actually touching, and with one twitch of his fingers — fingers that now only select songs for strangers to dance to — SPRING! her bra would magically come undone, and she would be standing there in awe of this man who had enticed her breasts to jump free of their coverings. Then she was next in line and had to ride a go-kart around and around the track with zero chest support. And she had never felt so free and alive in her life.

Do you know that in some cultures, women are treated like goddesses, but in others, they’re treated like slaves? And there’s no telling in some of those countries which way it’s going to go. My point being, in some parts of the globe, women have to watch themselves.

Meanwhile, here in the Western hemisphere, you get a woman in her thirties or forties who thinks she’s still in her twenties and she wears a dress with fucking feathers on it, to a wedding, and she thinks she’s ten different kinds of hot but she’s barely even one, if that. And we can ogle her legs and ass and tiny tits all we want, and she doesn’t mind it. She likes the attention. And it doesn’t occur to her to worry about the ogling because she believes she’s surrounded by this impenetrable force field. But she’s not. Because it would be so easy to break that thin shell, just press my finger against her little bubble and pop it all over her face.

What? Oh, I don’t know. I’m just using her as an example. I could say the same for any of the women here. The bride, even. But probably not the bride, since she’s got her big, tall, new husband with her this evening. After tonight, though, who knows?

Miss Feathers is an interesting specimen, let’s call her. Not exotic. No. I wouldn’t go that far. She’s a smoker, for one thing, which is disgusting. See, there she goes again, out for another puff session.

And if I were to follow her, say, just as a for-instance, walk out there and introduce myself — as in my name, because she’s already acquainted with my face — and maybe I’d cup my hands around her mouth, keep her lighter flame safe from the cold wind. Or else I’d let her fend for herself, depending on my mood.

I only want to talk to her, really. Ask her a few questions, see what makes her tick. I want to say to her, “Don’t you think I know what I’m doing up there? Don’t you think I’ve trained, gone to school for this? I have an actual framed diploma from an accredited institute that I happen to be very proud of. This is my career. And you think you know better than me what people like? What women like? You have your own ideas about how things should go? How about I show you how they should go, right now. How about I convince you, and maybe the next time you’ll think twice about second-guessing every decision I make, about micro-managing every tiny little detail.” And more words to that effect.

People need to be taught. They need to realize how the world works, and that there are professionals in their fields and chosen vocations. And professionalism needs to be respected.

You want to know how to be a great wedding DJ? You want to know the secrets? I’ll tell you. You go to bed late and you get up early. There are no secrets. There’s only you and me, right here and right now, on this dance floor.

And Miss Feathers, of course. There’s always a Miss Feathers. Maybe she and I can arrive at an understanding together out there in the cold, quiet night while you carry on in here where it’s warm and loud, sticking close to my list but maybe adding in a bit of your own variation, just a bit. You have to cut your teeth some time, right?

Worse comes to worse and I don’t come back in for a while, you know how to keep the party going. The knowledge is yours now. And you’ve got all those notes you’ve been taking.

Yeah, sure, you can go to the bathroom first. That’s probably a good idea.