As the Providence College volunteers know all too well, there’s a lot of intense case pushing, stage building, and other prep work that goes into the perfect dance party.  I’d consider myself a connoisseur of production gadgetry, and I love the design and build process.  But come on… the party is the fun part.

You put the finishing touches on the stage system, the house lights are off, and you retire to the green room to change into “show blacks.”  You can hear the entry music through the walls:  down-tempo, bassy, “quiet  before the storm” tunes.  You do some stretches, and maybe a few pushups, and talk with the crew about what’s about to go down.  As guests stream into the venue and are juuuust starting to get antsy, you walk back onto the stage, put on your headphones, do a final check on the mix gear, and drop the first big song of the night.

It’s go time.  WIth the Bambossa remix of Lady Gaga’s Just Dance pounding through 30+ speakers, this party had officially begun.

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Whew!  It’s been busy lately in GB land.  When we sat down to brainstorm for our presence at this year’s NACA conference, we couldn’t help but notice how nice it is to SIT and relax every once in a while.   While a far cry from the normal up-all-night sweaty dance party that we normally strive for, we decided that comortable seating would be the core of our sleek booth design for NACA 08.

Our first attempt at cool seating was the inflatable couch.  We ordered a prototype and took it for a test drive.  …Yikes.  If you ever have the opportunity to take a seat on an inflatable couch… well, don’t.  It’s really awkward.  But man, it would have been easy to transport.  Luckily for all you booth visitors, we scrapped the idea and opted for a less inflatable seating solution.

Springer and BobbyD test-drive an inflatable couch

After some 3D modeling and a trip to IKEA, we rounded up some truss and a couple of plasma screens and headed to Hartford to build the hottest booth in the history of the universe.

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Every college has one.

We’re not talking a Google Maps, get-right-where-you’re-going, detailed-and-to-scale version… oh no. These bad boys look like an oil painting where Bob Ross (RIP my curly friend) went a little overboard with the happy trees.

Here at GrooveBoston, we appreciate the beauty of these works of art. However, they make it IMPOSSIBLE to figure out where to GO on a campus. So, we have to re-work them a bit to suit our purposes.

Take our show this past weekend at UNE for example:

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It had been cloudy all day, with a little rain here and there.  No big deal, though; we got the generator in, built the truss, flew a bunch of speakers, and put amber gel in the lights to give the bar tent that warm, inviting feel (sounds pleasant, doesn’t it?).  Once again, the BC Mod Lot had been converted into a village of tent awesomeness, and was poised for another killer Homecoming party.

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Last Thursday morning, we headed out on a long day of leaf peeping, stopping occasionally to pick up sound and lighting gear.  The ride would leave us in Amherst, poised for an early start to our Friday build at UMass.

BobbyD and Springer check out some hoops before the UMass Amherst show

It would have been a relaxing evening at the hotel (we don’t get many of those!), except the Red Sox swept us up in their emotional roller coaster.  After 11 minutes at Applebees (they closed early), we caught the end of the magical comeback, did some intense high-fiving, then, ultimately, retired to rest up for a big weekend of dance parties.

Too bad Game 7 didn’t turn out as awesome as our shows last weekend.

Wah waaaaaaaah…  But seriously, our shows were awesome, and that’s what this is about.  Read on.

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