Five Weeks to DJ the School Disco. Any Requests?

Five weeks to go. I put a request box in reception, as the PTA+ guide to discos suggests. It filled in nine days. Sixty-one slips asked for the same song. Four asked whether there would be pizza. One, in handwriting I knew, asked for something by Black Sabbath, and was from my husband.

Three weeks. I read about Ben, who writes on his wife Laura Summers’s blog, and whose seven-year-old came home from a school disco in 2019 having asked the DJ for Iron Man by Black Sabbath. The DJ did not have it. He played “some tune called Shotgun” instead, and the boy was perfectly happy. Ben was the one left wondering whether he had done the right thing. I was not going to be the DJ who did not have it. I downloaded Black Sabbath. I downloaded all of it.

One week. One school in the PTA+ guide never lets its disco run past 90 minutes, because the children get over-tired. I made a 90-minute playlist, then a backup, then a backup for the backup, labelled “if Year 6 turn”. My husband offered his speaker, which is the size of a bin and was last used at a barbecue where the neighbours were very nice about it.

Five hours to go. The Reddit moment. I reordered the playlist four times and practised saying “This one’s for Year 3!” into a hairbrush. Our daughter, who is in Year 6 and attending, asked me not to say anything into anything.

The disco. It went well, for the children. The same guide warns that if you leave glow bracelets out for children to collect, “they just grab a handful!” I left them out. By 5.20 there were none left and one boy was wearing about forty, like a Christmas tree with opinions. Nobody asked for Black Sabbath. I played it anyway, at 6.10, to an empty floor and one dad by the squash table, nodding.

At the end I emptied the request box one last time, for the PTA records. There was a new slip at the bottom, in our daughter’s writing. It said: PLEASE CAN MUM STOP DANCING.