When Toddlers Go Clubbing

It’s two o’clock on a grey winter afternoon when we hit the nightclub. In the entrance of Circa, in the Entertainment District, my partner and I are trying to keep track of the two kids we know in a sea of kids we don’t. We crane as our two- and four-year-old bob toward the giant escalators and the twinkly lights upstairs, the pulse of “Tainted Love” luring them—a song that has been irritating me for three decades now. Swarms of nannies from a local babysitting company offer to take our jackets. Rows of tiny pink and black snow boots and strollers line the coat check; a massive bar is fully stocked with bottles of Jack Daniel’s and tequila.

This Sunday afternoon Andy Warhol Factory Party is the brainchild of Rebecca Brown, a former theatre director and a very pregnant mother of one. For two years, she’s been partnering with bars and clubs downtown and throwing parties for families, charging $10 per adult, $5 per kid. Brown calls her company Bunch, a name she chose because it evokes family, but in a new way. Plus, she thinks it’s a sweet little word.

When Brown had Sam, who’s now three, she was desperate to do fun things with him that didn’t involve trademarked cartoon characters. In the afternoons, when her engineer husband got home from work, they would put on music and dance around the house with the baby. This gave Brown the idea of throwing a big party where parents and kids could rock out together. With a friend, she reserved the main-floor bar at the Drake in February 2006. They sent out a notice via e-mail to about 100 people—parents they knew, parents the parents they knew knew. Brown was shocked when 800 people showed up; the line curled around the corner onto Beacons­field. Inside, disco balls spun and kids were ripping around the main floor in satin and silver. Recalls one mom, who had a great time, “It was like a nightclub, but with midgets.”

Since then, Bunch has thrown family parties in various venues across the city, each one a kind of ironic variation of historical-trendy touchstones that defined urban parents in their pre-child years: the disco party, the punk party, the Warhol party. Bunch also hosts a mellower “salon” at the Arts & Letters Club on Elm Street, billed as an event for the “kidtelligentsia.” Members of Broken Social Scene have led a songwriting workshop with Bunch kids. Little boys and girls write stories and do readings.

Rebecca Brown has an eyes-narrowed intensity when she talks, rubbing her pregnant belly. She is well aware of the rejuvenile theory, and how her bubbly parties can be interpreted as the worst kind of modern parenting, an obscene projection of adult interests onto unknowing children. She doesn’t buy it.

“I think this generation of parents has made a serious investment in the more soulful aspects of life, in quality of life,” she says. “Parents want to have amazing experiences with their kids. They want to be part of a community. It’s about sharing your interests with your kids just as you share theirs.”

Up the escalator, the club is divided into sections: in one area, kids and their parents are dancing, mostly to ’80s music. There’s no Wiggles, but there is some Michael Jackson, some hip hop. Shirley Temples are free; Blue Hawaiian slushies cost $3.50. Along the periphery of one dance floor, kids are paint-screening images of the word “love” and the Warhol banana onto big pieces of newsprint. My kids are eager to do this, but the lines are too long, just as they are at the giant chalkboard sculpture. Finally, they find two white plastic rabbits on the floor—part of the regular club decor—and seem content to sit there with their $1 cookies, oblivious to the cigarettes hanging from the rabbits’ mouths, which probably seem funny after several Jägermeisters but are just creepy in the daytime.

I admire Brown’s idealistic take on this kind of gathering. I have never met a parent—no matter how goateed or Bugabooed—who wasn’t trying, in all sincerity, to create a childhood of invention and grace for his or her kid. But the Warhol party is grating, filled with screaming children and an ungodly stench of old beer and, possibly, vomit. I realize, through my headache, that as much as we might try to shoehorn our kids into the pop interests of our pasts, they don’t really fit. Kids don’t care if they’re at a Dora Live show or a Broken Social Scene concert; they bring their chaos and curiosity and joy every­where they go. My toddler has managed to make a party out of a passport office.

The thing is, it’s more fun to do adult things without kids. I know I will continue to take my kids to brunch as a kind of training exercise for when they’re older, but it’s not really fun to corral a two-year-old before you’ve had your coffee. It’s work. Parenting is work, no matter how hiply it’s dressed up. Kids don’t really fit into the kind of narrow, High Fidelity framework that we cultivated so carefully in our 20s. They fit into the most profound places in our lives, burrowing down deep where it matters, leading us toward selflessness, love, meaning. But they are not so great at processing the superficial. Kids will wear “iPooped” T-shirts, and they won’t mind, but they don’t really fit them.

My four-year-old son loves Spider-Man though he has never seen the movie, an obsession born entirely of schoolyard gossip. He doesn’t care about the KolKid retro-’50s alphabet cards I strung up in his bedroom. He wants to glue a picture of Spider-Man to his shabby chic vintage dresser. After those initial hazy months when they’re babies—essentially luggage you can dress up and place around the room—they start to sprawl. Quickly, they develop their own passions that may or may not have anything to do with their parents, or with the Andy Warhol impersonator who just wandered past my daughter.

My partner hates it at Circa. “Why do we want to expose them to the shallowest, worst aspects of ourselves?” he says. “I had kids so I’d never have to go to a nightclub again.”

Our daughter is holding up her hands under a strobe light, laughing at the patterns. Our son is weeping because he can’t get a moon balloon off the ceiling.

I try to temper my partner’s irritation. I tell him to look at the parents, holding their kids under silver balloons, dancing their sweetly self-conscious dances. Many of them—most of them—look tired. Man, they look tired. Dads look as if they were dragged out of foxholes minutes before. Moms peer out from tight faces, eyes darting everywhere, making sure no one has fallen over a railing or crawled onto the DJ table. “Look at them,” I say. “They’re just parents.”

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