But for parental units of either description, Baby Loves Disco is the perfect middle ground.  It’s from 1 to 4 on a Saturday afternoon, easy to squeeze into a nap schedule [The Pumpkin slept in the car on the way down] and done way before anyone’s bedtime, including your own.  It’s $12 a pop per ambulatory human, easily beating out the cost of a family trip to the multiplex or the combined monetary and psychic expense of getting a babysitter and actually trying to go have a nice, romantic, adult night out sans kids [we’ve yet to tackle that one].  Plus, this way, you’re all having fun, together, dancing to music that doesn’t suck and that isn’t performed by people in foam rubber animal suits, face paint (unless somebody throws some glamrock in the mix), or rejected Starfleet uniforms,

 

 

Inside, the first thing we see is the front bar/lounge area, converted into the “chillout” room.  There’s a big spread of parent- and kid-friendly munchables, includes a couple kinds of finger sandwiches, Trader Joe’s juice boxes, and rows and rows of little styrofoam cups of rainbow Goldfish and pretzels and the like.  The Pumpkin ate at least two cupfuls of Goldfish.  That girl could live on Goldfish—I swear she can see those strategically places bins of mini cartons of ‘em at Target from three aisles away.  But anyway, the bar, populated by a handful of orphaned dads watching football on the plasma screens above it, serves sodas for 3 bucks, mixed drinks for 7 or 8, and beer from 4 and up.  We just do water.  Across the from the bar, where tables would be on a regular night, is the kids’ chillout area, festooned with pillows and beanbags and stuffed toys and books and more.  We end up spending most of our time here, with The Pumpkin hysterically playing peek-a-boo in the fold-up tent thing and taking apart pieces of the foam rubber floor puzzle mat laid down to cushion the kiddies from the polished concrete floors.  Yep, we’re at a club with a d.j. and a dance floor, and what does my girl want to do?  Eat, read with mama, and play with foam letters, natch.  What’s that they say about the apple and the tree?  Whatever....

 

 

 

I got a chance to talk to Chipper Smith, the LA party’s “host dad.”  He told me that this event’s turnout was low, probably because they had skipped a month for the holidays, but that usually there were about 400 kids and adults in there on a typical Saturday.  I’m sort of glad it wasn’t a full house for our first time, though.  Chipper had been involved with BLD since the LA launch last summer; the father of three, he was always looking for different family-friendly stuff to do, and this was something fun he could do with all of his kids.  The crowd was a pretty good cross-section of hipster-parent-LA—a good number of dads, some people of color (especially my tribe, we the miscegenated and racially ambiguous), though the parents seemed to skew older.  The kids ranged from asleep-in-a-Baby-Bjorn-with-no-neck-control to a school-aged breakdancer with skills.