Summer Camp crowd fired up at The O Lounge | The Honolulu Advertiser

Comment, blog & share photos

Summer Camp crowd fired up at The O Lounge | The Honolulu Advertiser | Hawaii's Newspaper

Posted on: Friday, August 18, 2006

THE NIGHT STUFF
Summer Camp crowd fired up at The O Lounge

Summer Camp at The O Lounge means elbow-to-elbow room at the bar on Wednesday nights. The party is on from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.

Photos by JOAQUIN SIOPACK | The Honolulu Advertiser

Alana Kobayashi, right, will mix a $3 drink you won't forget at The O Lounge.

It's early, and there's still room to walk through The O Lounge. By 1 a.m., it's wall-to-wall Summer Campers 18-and-older dancing to music ranging from Top 40 hip-hop and R&B to reggaeton.

SUMMER CAMP

Where: The O Lounge

When: 10 p.m.-2 a.m. Wednesdays

Cover: $10

18 and older OK? Yes

What to wear: Casually dressy to dressy; athletic wear and ball caps OK (sigh).

$3 drink test: Even a shot of Chivas Regal with a Coke back or Grey Goose cranberry was three bucks each.

The soundtrack: "Oye Mi Canto" — Nina Sky; "Crazy" — Gnarls Barkley; "Welcome to Jamrock" — Damian Marley; "Santeria" — Sublime; "Jump Around" — House of Pain; "Hollaback Girl" — Gwen Stefani; "Gasolina" — Daddy Yankee; "Genius of Love" — Tom Tom Club

A post-Summer Camp chat outside Saigon Passion III, while walking to my car:

Saigon Passion III bouncer: "Eh, where you goin', brah?"

Me: "Home."

Saigon Passion III bouncer: "Nah! Home is right here, brah!"

Me: Not if (my long-asleep partner in Night Stuff) has anything to say about it."

Waiting in line to get into clubs is often part of my job. But it's not always all that bad.

One of the perks is the opportunity to hone in on OPC (other people's conversations) and write about them. For example:

Dude at halfway point in queue to get into Summer Camp at The O Lounge: "If they play any Dave Matthews Band in there, I'm outta here! ... I never wait in line!"

Dude in butt-end of queue to get into Summer Camp at The O Lounge: "Well, you are now, dude!"

Laughter followed.

Christa (also in line, and who didn't want her last name to appear in a column her dad reads religiously each Friday with his first cup of office coffee) confessed that she'd met her "future ex-boyfriend" at the very first Summer Camp in May.

"He'll be so outta there by the time this comes out," said Christa, 21, laughing.

The Wednesday night weekly's overwhelming success since opening is likely due to a trio of circumstances:

Promoter Vertical Junkies' solid party reputation (NJOY at Chai's Island Bistro, Rock Star Fridays at Brew Moon) and even more solid MySpace friends and e-mail list.

$3 drinks.

It's summer!

The result? A party-hungry gathering of 18- to 30-year-olds wall to wall at O Lounge in the middle of the week, every week.

Summer Camp has become one of the lounge's three busiest nights, said owner Elizabeth Hata Watanabe. So busy, in fact, that she decided to extend it beyond the hot season. (It was just renamed Endless Summer Camp this week.)

The set list was heavy on post-millennial Top 40 hip-hop and R&B with a good dose of reggaeton thrown in (see side box). If you couldn't move to it, it simply wasn't on the decks.

By 1 a.m., The O Lounge dance floor was a grinding, sweaty sea of moving bodies that had beat down its original boundaries and expanded into the lounge. Patrons were dancing in cozier spots throughout the venue.

Atta Ho was checking out a couple of girls in matching white low-cut tank tops, grinding near the DJ booth to the Pussycat Dolls' "Don't Cha." Memories of a lion stalking gazelle on an Animal Planet documentary briefly flashed in my head.

"The drinks are cheap. The music is good. ... I've hooked up here many times," Ho said about Summer Camp's appeal.

Christa, from the velvet rope, wasn't looking for any of that.

"I just come with my girls to dance," she said, smiling.

You can sleep comfortably tonight, dad.

Sponsored by:

Comment, blog & share photos