Party ’til the break of 10pm: Inside the club ‘for women who have things to do next morning’

About 6.15pm on a Friday earlier this month, women of a certain age began to trickle into Fete Music Hall, a venue in Providence, Rhode Island. 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?” Campo asked, surveying the scene.

This was Providence’s inaugural instalment of Earlybirds Club, a roving dance party that takes place between the hours of 6pm and 10pm.

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 skincare-line founder – who came up with the concept in 2023 when they met for coffee after their 30th high school reunion.

Just as your opportunities to dance begin to evaporate, you will find that you need them more than ever.

They got to talking “quote-unquote million-dollar ideas”, said 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 said. Yet somehow she couldn’t get excited about dancing all night to EDM.

She told Lee, also 49, that she’d always harboured a dream of hosting a dance party. It would be a safe, judgment-free zone geared towards 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”. (Although the site uses a cruder word than things.)

The next day, 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 DJ: 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, California and Seattle.) All have sold out.

I was initiated to Earlybirds in March, in the gritty back room of New York’s 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?

‘I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks!’

Jodi Burke, Earlybirds clubber

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 noughties 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.

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 fundraiser here, a 50th birthday there, maybe the odd bar 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 polarised 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 3.30pm 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 about 7.30pm, 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 which she said she had picked up during her child’s recent college tour. Marvelling at the crowd, she added, “All the dancers are so polite!”

‘You need space to be free’

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.”

About 8.30pm, 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 travelling to the parties, for the same reason that motivated her to get Earlybirds off the ground virtually overnight: She’s battling stage 4 breast cancer. Via email, Lee called Earlybirds “a safe space to be seen and heard for women, who are generally the caretakers”.

When 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.

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 sceptic, was acting out prayer hands and reaching to the heavens.

By 10pm, I’d danced so hard that my legs felt leaden. But my heart was so full, I could have gone on forever.