Omophagy: Go Go Buffalo!

Location: Can TV Studios
Show: Chic-A Go-Go's 500th Episode Taping with Casper
Cost: Free
Things I missed to be there: Sleep

Derik the Cameraman: For some of you, I may need to set this up. If you have been to any... African-American social events in the last thirty years, you've heard something by Casper. He's our Frank Sinatra.

There are only a few benefits to playing music in Chicago: occasionally you might get a blowjob, you get free half-pitchers at the Mutiny, and then there's Chic-A Go-Go. Chic-A Go-Go is a cable access dance party that's kind oflikeaSid & Marty CrofftSoul Train. The show is hosted by the tattood Miss Mia and the skinhead rat puppet Ratso. The tapings are open to the public, and attract a good mix of children,hipsters, weirdos, and college students dancing to music by the likes of The Shadows of Knight, Ol Dirty Bastard, Prince, Ciara, the Ramones, and Howlin Wolf. The show features at least one "live" band an episode. I've got the "live" in quotation marks because the bands never plug in so most of the time, the band is just miming and lip synching.

However fun that is (and it isone of the most fun things you can do in this city), it's one of the reasons I haven't written about it in Omophagy. Sure, I've had the opportunity to dance with Shonen Knife to one of their songs, but I wouldn't describe it as seeing them. Every once in a while though, there's an act with low enough technical requirements that they can do a real live set. Black Bear Combo was able to do their gypsy dance alongside the skating girls of the Windy City Rollers, K.A.R.A.O.K.E. was able to bring people up in front of a green screen to sing revolutionary spoofs of classicrock songs, and for part two of their five-part, 500th Episode Spectacular, Chic-A Go-Go brought out one of Chicago's first rappers, Casper.

Casper, who got the name because of his tendency to only wear white, has been DJing and rapping in the city since the 1970s, but his most lasting contribution to music has been the "Cha Cha Slide". The Cha Cha Slide is an update of the old electric slide, it's one of those catchy/annoying/earworm songs that tells you how to dance to it so that everyone is doing the same thing at the same time: turn left, turn right, hop, step, crisscross, Charlie Brown, et cetera. Needless to say, it's a big hit at weddings and Bar Mitzvahs and will probably remain so for years to come. While the song hit big in 2000, it was actually created four years earlier, for a Bally's aerobics instructor who wanted to a song that he could use as a work out (for reference, this is a few years before the Dance Dance Revolution workout and a few years after Sweating to the Oldies, about the time that Tae Bo was the big thing).

Derail one: There's an episode of Futurama where, looking to make a name for himself, the robot Bender horns in on a circle of dancing rollerbladers, trying to get them to "Do the Bender".

"This circle is about free expression, man, not your fascist moves!"

I kind of feel that way, when I'm in the middle of a crowd and one of those songs comes on, but it might just be acase of sour grapes because have really slow reflexes.

Derail two: In 1999, I was on a flight to Israel, watching the movie "She's All That" with my Dad and Sister. At one point in the climactic scene at the prom, the DJ yells, "Now everybody do that dance I taught you!" and everyone breaks into an enormous choreogrphed, synchronized dance. We lost our shit. Now everybody do that dance I taught you became a running joke of ours for years.

So here we are in 2007, a TV station full of children and people who don't look like they dance very often and a black dude in a bomber jacket and white tracksuit, telling them, "Lets hop three times!" and slowly this group of students, weirdos, hipsters, and kids comes together into something nearly reaching cohesion.