When I first moved to Austin, I only had a few friends, but by the time I left, that had changed completely because of one place. For the first year that I lived in Austin, I didn’t go out and I couldn’t figure out how to meet anyone outside of my yoga classes. I knew I wanted to get back into the country dancing that I enjoyed in college at Texas State University, but the place we always went back then (The Broken Spoke) was on the south side and I lived on the north side. When you live in a city as spread out as Austin, this type of location disparity is a big deal.
When I moved to Austin from Houston, I committed myself to a bi-monthly trip to meet my ex-husband halfway for his weekend visits with our son. As I was driving back to Austin one Friday night, I had finally discovered the best country dancing near me and it was called Dallas Night Club, so I decided to check it out. I went home, got dressed and with a dose of courage born from a year of loneliness, I walked into that country bar by myself and ordered my favorite drink – a Jim Beam and Diet Coke. I tried to look like I belonged there, but my heart was pounding, and I was afraid to make eye contact with anyone. Instead, I leaned against dance floor railing casually sipping my drink.
I wanted to dance so badly, but it had been years since those freewheeling days in college when we would drive from San Marcos to Austin every Wednesday night to listen to The People’s Choice, our favorite local band. As this new to me place started to fill up and the music got louder and better, I saw a group of girls posing for photos. At some point, they waved me over and within a few minutes, we were chatting and laughing like longtime friends. The rest is history. Those girls saved me and to this day, I don’t think they will ever know how grateful I am. This was around 2009 and social media was just becoming popular. By the end of the night, I had connected with all of them and had plans to come back on my next kid-free weekend.
One of the best things about reconnecting to one of my favorite former pastimes was that I started to reconnect to myself. Getting married, becoming a mom followed by a devastating divorce, I felt like I had become lost in all the roles I was playing. Leaving the heat and congestion of Houston was the first step, but I needed to figure out who I was again. As I made friends at Dallas Night Club, I reconnected to the carefree, happy girl that had once been my calling card and dancing, specifically two-stepping, made me feel like myself again. Dancing became like a gateway drug for me, and I found myself living for my next fix. I didn’t even need to drink. In fact, drinking actually made it harder for me to dance!
Summer nights turned into a sweaty, smiling, happy mess of matching up with the best dancers and spinning around the dance floor. Every other weekend, I would meet up with my girls, many of them also single moms, and we would tear it up. I met so many new people through my new friends and their friends that people actually started to think that I grew up there! The ripple effect from that first night kept expanding. New friendships kept evolving as I met more and more people. It was hard to really get to know people when I would only see them on the dance floor, or be introduced through mutual friends, but I eventually found my full-time people. The one thing that kept us all connected was our love for the charm of a cowboy who could dance, walking by in his starched Wranglers, cowboy hat and boots. (Swoon).
Eventually, a few other clubs came onto the scene, and we would make the rounds, but the one that started it all was Dallas Night Club, and none of the others could compare in my opinion. It was the place to see and be seen on Halloween, Thanksgiving Eve and New Year’s not to mention every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday night. It was a jam-packed, wall to wall melee of people. The magnetic vibe of “doing a lap”, flirting with cowboys and hanging with friends in our favorite nook of the club was all part of the magic.
I grew up in Pasadena, TX, home to Gilley’s, the “largest honkey tonk in the world” and the place where the movie Urban Cowboy was filmed. I was too young to go to Gilley’s when it was in its prime, but after all the good times and memories I have from my time at Dallas Night Club, I like to think that they were cut from the same cloth. They offered people a place to blow off steam after a long work week, meet up with friends, dance, have fun and maybe fall in love.
As Austin started to grow, the real estate under the club became more valuable than the club itself. I don’t know why it actually closed, but close it did. After the doors of Dallas Night Club were finally shuttered, a few other places tried to absorb the locals that had loved it, but they could not compare with the huge dance floor, the neon signs, or the dj and bartenders that everyone loved. Dallas Night Club wasn’t just a bar; it was like an extended family. It was a place that gave you a reason to get dressed up whether it was in jeans, skirts, shorts or tank tops. The only prerequisite was a desire to let loose and have fun.
In September 2016, the club closed its doors, and I missed it. I was still living in Austin but had been in a relationship that took me away from the freedom of dancing with strangers. By then, most of the girls I used to meet up with had gotten into steady relationships as well and for whatever reason, we all just stopped going regularly.
Soon after that, I moved out of Texas and into Colorado. I traded my dancing boots for hiking boots and shifted all my passion and attention to conquering mountains instead of dance floors, but every time I hear a good country song, and especially when I hear “I Love This Bar” by Toby Keith, I am reminded of all the times that a little place in Austin, Texas called Dallas Night Club lifted me up and changed my life.
This is me being me . . . 