Adults in silky pink suits, pirate paraphernalia, and fake hair of assorted varieties. Children in striped tights, fairy wings, capes, cowboy boots, and leopard print pants. A rat puppet and a pixie-punk woman with tattooed arms and a short, black and silver dress that shines underneath the TV lights. Indie rock, punk, hip hop, cha-cha – whatever plays, they dance.
Every age, every race, every class. They’d be quaintly quirky, this random assemblage moving to any beat that comes along, if this were like any other children’s TV show – forcefully P.C. with an ethnically diverse array of characters arranged as carefully as a Pottery Barn living room.
But this is “Chic-A-Go-Go,” Chicago’s public access dance TV show, and this group wasn’t selected at all. They just came.
Roughly every month, the Chicago Access Network opens its doors to everyone. Once inside, the hushed and quietly humming TV monitors of the gray-carpeted studio are disturbed by shrieks from the basement that houses the snacks and the guests (some of them children), while Miss Mia (the tattooed co-host) and Ratso (the rat puppet manned by co-producer Jake Austen) tape the opening segments of the show. Soon, the bands will come and pretend to play, the guests will fill the studio, and everyone will be dancing. In the words of Adam Green, “Baby, come dance with me, on TV, at the TV station.”
Sipping apple juice in the basement, I meet a middle-aged man with an eye patch peeking out of his bangs and two perfectly good blue eyes staring out of his tanned face. He’s here with a woman who is also wearing an eye patch. She has a pirate costume and a daughter in the seventh grade as well. The daughter glowers with embarrassment, the kind reserved especially for parents in costume.
“This show isn’t original. It only feels original because of the blurry demographics.” – Jake Austen
As though the costume weren’t enough, the pirate informs me that her daughter is on the dance team. She then laments the fact that the girl has refused to wear her dance team outfit today, but hoping to remedy her daughter’s low-key appearance, extracts mascara from her purse. Daughter shakes her head. Pirate rises from the chair. A chase ensues.
Inside the studio, Miss Mia and Ratso finish up their banter and Austen crawls out from underneath his puppeteer’s table, a surprisingly small space for a tall man with some heft behind him. In his other lives, Jake is a member of the masked band The Goblins as well as an editor, writer, and creator of Roctober zine. He started “Chic-A-Go-Go” eight years ago with his wife Jacqueline after watching a tape of the ’60s dance TV show “Kiddie-a-Go-Go.”
And though Austen maintains that the show is for children, its participants tell a different story. Not that there aren’t any kids here – it’s just that there are also a lot of teenagers, twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings, and forty, fifty, sixty, and seventy-somethings as well.
“It was always meant to be for kids, whether the kids came or not,” says Austen. “We have a lot of non-kids bands doing kids stuff. It can be freaky as long as it’s wholesome freaky.”
Some of the more famous non-kids bands to lend their lip-synching talents to “Chic-A-Go-Go?” Sleater Kinney, Cheap Trick, Patti Smith, The Red Krayola, Will Oldham, Alejandro Escovedo, The Misfits, and Fugazi.
The show kicks off with a conga line that happens so suddenly I can’t tell whether it’s been initiated by the crew or it’s a spontaneous explosion of excitement stoked by the hot TV lights. Soon, the El Train starts, a dance formation where two dancers at a time make their way towards the camera and then peel off down the sides.
We begin sheepishly, the adults making ironic and semi-embarrassed eyes at the camera. But we come down the line again and again – two, three, four, five, six, seven times. The dance-team girl shows off her moves, each trip down progressively more daring, and then she kneels low to the ground, slithers onto her stomach, and squirms her way toward the camera, doing the worm. Everyone is cheering and clapping and hooting and she has an enormous grin. And then we stare at the thousands of potential viewers in that camera lens and we dance as if no one was watching at all.
“You know,” Austen tells me after the show, “people always say this show is so original. This show isn’t original. It only feels original because of the blurry demographics.”
And though “Chic-A-Go-Go” may not be made for its blurry demographics, it’s made by them.
After years at school dances, parties, and bars, dancing is, for most of us, a practice of exclusion. We make our choices; we hope to be chosen. But here, for this one afternoon, everyone dances and they dance together and they dance just because it feels good.
As well as being uplifting, this principle of inclusion is, on occasion, funny. “We have a lot of traditionally inappropriate guests on,” Austen tells me. Today’s traditionally inappropriate guest is Andre Williams. He’s impeccably dressed, and at 71, a dapper old dandy of an R&B musician.
Miss Mia initiates their short interview with perk. “I was so lucky I got to play drums behind you once!”
“I didn’t remember you at first,” replies Williams. He adds with a sleazy grin, “I didn’t remember you until I smelled you.”
Smooth as ever, Miss Mia smiles energetically, laughs rapidly, and segues tactfully into a discussion of Williams’s musical career before cuing an “appropriate” Williams song.
– Story by Kim Velsey, photos by Casey Sachen