I know what you’re thinking, Highland Park High School Senior Class Prom. Well I hate to say it but that’s wrong. This was the Highland Park Senior Citizens Prom.This particular day was an over 90° day. So I make my way to Highland Park. They have a Senior/Youth Center where they hold events for kids and senior citizens. The name of my contact was Kim Perkins. Kim tells me that they’ve been doing the Senior Prom for eight years. The DJ that they normally use is also the chief of the fire department. Unfortunately this year he had knee surgery so he could not DJ this event. So I’m the very first DJ outside the Township to ever have the honor to DJ the Senior Prom.

The room was set up to coordinate with this theme “Under the Stars”. So you can imagine there was glitter and stars, a beautiful set up for the senior citizens. The Senior/Youth Center had lots of volunteers to help decorate, coordinate and serve the food to the senior citizens that attended. They had set up a backdrop for everyone to get their picture taken, they also had ballots to vote on this year’s Prom King and Prom Queen. The prom was set to start at 5 PM and end at 8 PM. Well as most senior citizens do they started showing up at 4:30 PM.

To start off the night I played some what I like to call “Rat Pack Music”. This consists of, as you can imagine, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Tony Bennett, and so on and so forth. Dinner was being served right away. And it took about 20 minutes for them to get the food out and about another 15 for all of the guests to eat. Of course I kept the dinner music a little older, classic, very low-key for them to enjoy while they ate.

Right before I opened up the dance floor I’m introduced to the Chief of Police. He informs me that every year him and handful of officers volunteer their time to dance with all the senior citizens. I thought that was awesome. So now it is time for me to open up the dance floor. Of course I got requests for everything from big band, classic rock of the 50s, 60s, 70s. Now all that is great but I as a DJ love to see a dance floor no matter what type of music I play. So I was very particular of which songs from which decade I played.

Now it was time to open the dance floor. But I did ask myself, What if they don’t dance? Well let me tell you, they danced! They danced to just about everything I played.. Of course I played a lot of slow music I played line dances such as the electric slide. I even did a hora, only because someone had requested that I do that. We crowned our new King and Queen. They also had a very special song to dance to, Unchained Melody.

Now it was time for dessert. They had some cake and they had some coffee. Just as everyone started showing up early, people started to leave early but a handful of people did stay until 8 PM. At the end of the night the Chief of Police came up to me to tell me he’s never seen them dance so much. All the guys told me they had a great time.

I took some pictures for you guys so you can see how much fun they had that night.