I was too young to go to discos and dance to Chic and the like. (By the time I was of age, dance venues were called clubs, and I hewed to New Wave.)

I’ve talked before about Mrs. Sturgis, my fifth-grade teacher (I’m getting a lot of mileage out of her on this blog, which is weird since she was far from my favorite teacher) and how she really pushed music in our class. The thing I haven’t mentioned about her music education style was how she handled contemporary stuff. A lot of my grade-school teachers reserved a chunk of Friday afternoon to play records as a sort of “survived another week” reward, but Mrs. Sturgis was the only one who made us all get up and do jazzercise steps to both KC and the Sunshine Band masterpieces: Boogie Shoes AND Get Down Tonight. I’m pretty sure she also had a routine for Funky Town, but I have blocked that out.

My parents, on the other hand, considered disco to be on a par with nighttime soap operas, comic books, and other pop culture junk food—they were way more Koko Taylor than Gloria Gaynor. They’d punch the car radio buttons like they were trying to shove the entire component out of the dashboard when a disco song would come on. So all disco appreciation at home took place on headphones or in my bedroom. When a friend got me K-Tel’s Full Tilt, I liked the SOS Band as much as I liked Blondie and Devo. My parents rolled their eyes and closed my door.

In high school, I dated a guy whose musical spectrum was much broader than my own, and he traced Nile Rodgers from Duran Duran back to Chic. And thus my delight in disco blossomed. Cheryl Lynn, Alicia Bridges, Kool and the Gang—all of it.

The only aspect of disco that I never cottoned to was the Bee Gees. Maybe it’s their voices; maybe it’s all the jokes and parodies associated with them, I don’t know. But somehow that’s one aspect of disco that leaves me cringing in a fair approximation of my parents’ reaction.

This disappoints my husband, who came of age during disco but has seen maybe two mirror balls in person in his entire life and never wore dagger collars or bell-bottoms, as far as I know. Somehow the only things he DID get out of disco were the two things I avoid: the Bee Gees and the John Travolta movies.

But that’s OK, because we can come together for Whit Stillman’s Last Days of Disco, which ranks pretty high on both our favorite movie lists and one I always recommend as a must see to friends.

A movie (but not that movie, although I know he saw it as a wee sprog) was also my kid’s first disco influence. (He insists his entrée to disco was Daft Punk’s Discovery, but I take issue with this since that wasn’t from the disco era—that makes it a gateway, at best.) I count his first actual influence as the soundtrack to The Martian, which I also highly recommend.

All that said, however, I think the Surf Punks probably wrote the all-time best disco song ever. Listen to it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeBf1RA2LNs