When:
Fri July 29
Where:
Pastoral Wallingford

"Your chances of getting laid at a dance party are, like, 50 percent higher than at a bar," claims one of the women on the front stoop of this house party, trying to coax a couple of dubious boys into paying an entry donation. The ploy works, and inside, awash in a hundred-plus-degree body-heat sauna, is a sharply dressed crowd dancing to '80s music and hiphop. This party is a fundraiser to benefit Boom Across Washington, an unofficial nonprofit whose goal, our hosts explain, is to permanently install boomboxes in public spaces across Seattle, Olympia, and Tacoma to engender "community involvement" by promoting "public dance parties."

The Tacoma BAW representative informs Party Crasher that we are crashing parties altogether wrong. It seems that when Tacomans crash a party, "the motherfuckin' party stays crashed!" To prove his point, he turns to the dance floor and shouts, "PARTY!" and the party, without missing a beat, replies, "WOOOOO!"

Suitably chastened, Party Crasher and our plus-ones move downstairs to the garage/smoking lounge, where we find a young man, inexplicably wearing lederhosen, holding a dead crow in a plastic bag. "I found it on the street," he says, near tears, and he tells us of his plan to take the corpse to a "wooded place" and give it a proper burial. Maybe it's the dance-fueled heat delirium, but we believe it all: We believe in BAW; we believe that roadkill deserve loving memorial services. It's summer, and it's a dance party, and, really, why not?