Free Williamsburg

sober rave (c/o Gothamist & Mathew Gilbertson)

sober rave (c/o Gothamist & Mathew Gilbertson)

Thanks to Gothamist for doing the leg work. There’s just no way we could take sober dancing and animal masks at 6:30 AM.

A $20 ticket to Morning Gloryville gets you the following: three hugs upon entry (one from each of the Morning Gloryville crew), a plastic lei, and three and a half hours of dancing. There’s a smoothie bar, where smoothies are $6-a-pop and juices run $9, and you can purchase Brooklyn Roasting Co. coffee for around $2-$3, if you so desire. Massages are available for a “suggested donation,” and crews were leading soggy yoga classes every 5 to 10 minutes on the Zoo’s rainy roof.

The dancing, though, was Morning Gloryville’s real bread-and-butter, with DJs blaring house music that reverberated all the way down Bogart Street. The Zoo—which was packed by 7:30 a.m.—boasted a bouncy floor and trampoline, and attendees were all over it, climbing walls, doing handstands and flipping from a rope swing in the middle of the room. The Zoo’s garage doors were open, and passersby kept stopping to snap photos of the dozens of grown-ass adults in sequins doing pike jumps and tossing giant blow-up balls around the faux-graffitied wall.

Morning Gloryville advertises itself as a pre-work “sober rave,” a description that stressed me out initially—how does one survive a strobe-light dance party without intoxicants? Is it appropriate to spike a mango smoothie? Can you blog on an Ecstasy comedown? But those concerns were all for naught, because what Morning Gloryville really is, is a $20 gym class, designed to pump you with endorphins before you move into your cubicle for the day. I prefer running in circles around Maria Hernandez Park but, hey, everybody’s doing their own thing.
The next edition Morning Gloryville goes down on August 13th at 6:30 a.m.; buy your tickets online.

More pics here. You can get tickets for the next sober rave here.