Hello Hola and Bonjour faithful readers,
And welcome to part two of the mullet series. That's right, party people- mullet part two: party in the back, detailing all of the gloriousness that was Birthday Month 2012. Everyone knows that a bangin playlist is the most important detail of any partay, so we are gonna get this party started with a playlist compiled of Cameroon's finest:
1. Chop My Money - P Square
2. Pinguis - Daniel Barka
3. Donner moi les mathematiques - Les 2 qui tue
4. On vous connait - Patience Dabany
5. Tchokolo - X-Maleya
6. Je te promets- Zaho
7. Gagner, gagner -Petit Pays
8. Memenan - Amina Poulloh
9. Waka Waka (This Time for Africa) - Shakira
Aw yeeeeah. Try and act like those tunes don't make you want to hop out of your seat to find the nearest mirror and break it down. I dare you. Despite the undeniable awesomeness of African music, club DJs tend to be equal opportunists in their musical selections, and usually play just as much American music as they do African music, namely my current JAM "Got 2 Luv U" by Sean Paul and Alexis Jordan. I freaking LOSE IT whenever that song comes on in the clurb. Lose. It. But I digress. Let's boogie.
All of the best nights of Birthday Month were spent at the clurb, mirror dancing and fist pumping like champs. As my Birthday Month gift to you, faithful readers, I will now detail the top two nights of Birthday Month 2012 for your reading pleasure:
2. Hotel Mizao, BCC Conference Wrap Party: Thursday, February 16, 2012. In February, the Xtreme North region lucked out by being chosen to host Peace Corps Cameroon's first Behavior Change Communication Workshop at Hotel Mizao in Maroua. The workshop was awesome, so it follows that our wrap party on the last night was off the chizain. Hotel Mizao is a swagged-out hotel in Maroua, fully equipped with air conditioned rooms, a swimming pool, and most importantly- a boite, AKA clurb, right in the parking lot. Holla! Apparently Mizao didn't get the memo that Thursday night is the new Friday night because they don't normally open the club on Thursdays, but we assured them we'd make it worth their while if they made an exception for us, and so they acquiesced. And so it was set- all PCV participants and their Cameroonian counterparts were invited to come celebrate a successful workshop at Club Mizao, in the hopes that things were gonna get weird. Our hopes for a weird night were realized beyond our wildest dreams. Everyone was on their A Game. I don't know if this is true for Peace Corps Volunteers worldwide, but we volunteers in the Xtreme of CamCam like to GET DOWN on the dancefloor. Seriously- all 29 of us- dancing fools. Give one of us a mirror and bump the P Square, and watch us go. So as you can imagine, we are a force to be reckoned with when we appear on a dance floor as a group. Now factor into the equation a couple of bottles of whiskey and a covey of Cameroonians who share our passion for getting down, and we've got ourselves a PARTY. As per usual, I was dripping sweat (and awesomeness) within 3 minutes of hitting the dance floor. I made my way over to the floor-to-ceiling mirrors to get my mirror dance on slash take in my own dancing prowess, where I met a few Cameroonian girls who hadn't been part of our workshop. We totally hit it off- they taught me some of their sweet dance moves, and I taught them some of mine, then when I ran into them the next morning we exchanged numbers. Turns out they were prostitutes. Prostitute BFFs... Casual. But back to our party- at some point in the evening the bumpin jams were interrupted by a particularly loquacious Cameroonian counterpart who had managed to finagle a microphone from the DJ booth and took it upon himself to MC the party. We all immediately knew who it was- he had [uninvitedly, out of turn] talked our ears off all week, but we also knew it was not going to be an easy task to wrench the mic out of his hands- once he got going on some rant, he was not so hot on taking social cues or even outright pleas to desist. I volunteered to handle the situation, making a beeline for the DJ booth then spotting and locking in on my target. I approached him amicably, smiling and gently suggesting he come join the rest of us in the dance floor, which he immediately shot down of course. I had no choice but to switch tactics, and lunged for the mic guerilla warfare style. I was quick, but he was quicker, and dodged my attack. I turned to the DJ, and begged him to intervene and reclaim his mic, but he was a useless dillweed who could not serve me beyond spinning awesome tunes. I turned back around, and my loquacious arch enemy was distracted, so I nabbed the mic in his moment of weakness- I know it was dirty warfare, but desperate times call for desperate measures and all is fair in love and war and he was ANNOYING! I deposited the mic in the DJ booth, and pulled the enemy onto the dance floor, immediately pushing him into a conga line. I returned to my mirror dancing posse ready to regale them with my victorious war stories and get back to enjoying my evening, when my relentless arch nemesis made his reappearance as the world’s worst MC ever. In a fit of rage, I navigated through the pulsating throng of the dance floor, then clotheslined the bastard. JK. I just switched tactics again, grabbing both his hands and pulling him onto the dance floor, thereby forcing him to deposit the mic in the DJ booth himself. The plan was foolproof... except that I was stuck dancing with the chump until I passed him off to someone else a few songs later. Nassara Sarah saves the day!! There were some other international volunteers who came and joined our party at some point, thereby doubling the white male population of the evening (from 2 to 4). One of them was particularly limber on the dance floor. I chose to use the word limber there because at one point in the evening, he and I were reenacting the dance scene in Grease where John Travolta bends all the way back onto the floor and hand jives in-between Olivia Newton John's legs. Yeah. That happened. At another point in the evening, I was minding my own business getting down on the dance floor, when all of a sudden I am LIFTED off the ground and thrown into the air- over and over again. My John Travolta and his Cameroonian friend had apparently selected me as a potential projectile object in their evening, and went ahead and acted on that impulse despite all pertinent laws of gravity and normal social decorum. When my feet were safely planted back on planet earth, I thought I might take a breather in our VIP booth and sip on one of the bottles we'd popped, but I wasn't three steps deep when I got sucked back into the dance floor by the music. Club music has a gravitational pull on my soul that keeps my body moving like a cyclone and prevents me from entertaining any whim of taking a breather as well as my friends invitations to come have a drank. It's a problem. Fo realz. However, when my counterpart approached me on the dance floor to inform me that he had bought us a coke to split, I was forced to accept his invitation. Upon sitting down, I asked my very traditional Muslim counterpart if he would mind if I spiked the coke he bought for me with whiskey. He said that's fine- we're tight; so he was bound to find out that I'm a hot mess at some point, right? I downed my drank as fast as I could so that I could get myself back on the dance floor, which is where I stayed until 2am when I sketchily dipped out in a desperate search for bottled water that wouldn't cost me an arm and a leg. There was a brief after party in mine and Cynthia's hotel room, which mostly just consisted of us guzzling water and cookies and watching Trace- a channel that plays nonstop music videos thereby making it nonstop awesome. And that, my friends, was how I rang in Birthday Month 2012- fighting the good fight against obnoxious MC wannabes, defying laws of gravity and befriending prostitutes. Boom.
1. Club UV, Birthday Night: Saturday, February 25, 2012. All of the Xtreme North was in Maroua for birthday weekend, so I made everyone go out to Club UV with me to ring in my 23rd year of life. I was wearing an eighties madonna-inspired short poofy hot pink number with black sequin phallic accents, AKA “the birthday dress of the Xtreme North region,” so you KNOW I was lookin fly. I rolled up to the clurb loving life, breezing by the bouncer, when all of a sudden the bouncer threw his arm out and asked me to pay an entry fee. QUOI? I scoffed, and informed him that it was my BIRTHDAY! SHALOM! Can’t you see my sweet birthday dress?! He pressed for the money, so I repeated to him that it was my birthday, sure that he just hadn’t understood me the first time. He wouldn’t relent, but I was over his beating a dead horse act, and just bolted past him through the doors, easily blending in with all the other white PCVs. HA! My peeps who were behind me eventually followed suit, and once we were all in (FO FREE), we got the partay started!! The tunes were starting out kind of slow, so I let myself into the DJ booth and introduced myself to the DJ, then pointed out to him all the songs that I would like to hear that night in celebration of my birthday. He went with it, so I excused myself from his booth to go shake what my momma gave me all over the dance floor. You know the drill- sweating, mirror dancing and fist pumping the night away, befriending shady characters, etc. etc. I lost my shit every time Rihanna or Sean Paul came on- especially my jam Got 2 Luv U!!! Ooh ooh!!! I kept popping in and out of the DJ booth, helping him to acquire a taste for the higher musical arts- like Rihanna and Sean Paul. Then, right before midnight, I went into the booth and had him do a countdown on the speakers for my birthday. At midnight, I busted out of the DJ booth as he was shouting “HAPPY BIRTHDAY SARAH!!!!” over the speakers, and ran onto the dance floor to my screaming fans (screaming fans, non-screaming friends… potato, potato). At some point, Cynthia iced me, and I guzzled it down like water- I am getting way too good at the Icing your Bros game. There was also a puke and rally involved at some point in the evening, but I will spare you the details. Just know that I still got it! The princess rages on! The Xtreme likes to party. So who’s coming to visit me next year for my birthday?! Birthday Month 2012 was good, but Birthday Month 2013 will be better. Promise.
So, there you have it, folks. Mullet, Part Two: Party in the Back. Boom.
Peace love and Part A.
