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The medic was still checking vitals when someone cranked up Cardi B.
I swear I'm not making this up. There we were at the Copley Square town hall last Tuesday — the one about the new transit proposals — and three people passed out in the span of twenty minutes. The paramedics had just loaded the second person onto a stretcher when somebody's phone bluetoothed to the hall speakers and "I Like It" started blasting.
That's when things got interesting.
Within thirty seconds, my 74-year-old neighbor Dorothy was two-stepping with a college kid in a Bernie Sanders shirt. Councilman Marcus Williams — the guy who'd been droning on about budget allocations for the past hour — dropped his binder and started doing what I can only describe as "dad dancing with surprising enthusiasm." Even the paramedic on break was bobbing her head.
The whole thing lasted about forty minutes. Someone pulled up the electric slide on YouTube. A group of teenagers started doing the wobble near the back. Two women I'd never met formed an immediate line dancing partnership that honestly deserved its own spotlight. The energy was absurd in the best way.
Here's what I'll remember most: after the third person needed medical attention, the room went dead silent. Genuinely terrified silence. We didn't know if it was the food, the heat, or something worse. And then someone — I still don't know who — made the call to turn that fear into something else entirely.
By the time "Uptown Funk" came on, the tension had completely broken. People were laughing, some were crying (happy tears, weirdly), and the paramedic team was giving us that look like "these people are insane but okay, we'll stay nearby."
Town halls are supposed to be boring. Complaint sessions followed by budget debates followed by people checking their phones under the table. This one started that way too. But it ended with a room full of strangers linked arm-in-arm, swaying to "Dancing in the Dark" like we'd known each other for years.
Dorothy asked me at the end whether this was "against protocol." I told her I had absolutely no idea, but I didn't care. Neither did she.
The next morning, local news ran the story with the headline "Chaos at Boston Town Hall Leads to Unexpected Joy." That's one way to put it. I'd call it 40 minutes of pure, unfiltered human stubbornness — the refusal to let a bad moment stay bad.
Word is, next month's zoning meeting already has a playlist planned.
