February 1999: The month I went to my first rave, and the exact same month of the founding of DanceSafe, a non-profit, volunteer-run organization dedicated to keeping partygoers safe and healthy. A year and a half later, I signed up for a training while visiting DanceSafe's booth at a party in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. And the rest is history... Please wait for all the images to load.
Check out articles on my outreach work, on-campus and off-campus
DanceSafe Pictures...
2000-2001,
2002-2004, 2005, Hong Kong, 2006
DanceSafe Pictures...
2000-2001,
2002-2004, 2005, Hong Kong, 2006
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As usual, Phoenix is at the table working while I'm off partying :) !!!
Skills Free Party at Golden Gate Park, San Francisco - June 16, 2001
Photos courtesy of Phoenix Llanes
"Ascension," held at Blake's in Berkeley, CA - June 7, 2001. Photos courtesy of Phoenix Llanes (co-volunteer
in white). Dude in orange is Dave of Acme Productions (DanceSafe supporter & "Ascension" organizer).
At one point, the DanceSafe chapter of the Bay Area was called S.H.A.R.E. Project. The acronym stood
for Safety, Health, Awareness, Responsibility, Education, although some volunteers only remembered it
as Speed, Heroin, Acid, Reefer, Ecstasy (hahaha), totally unintentional. Anyway, the concept was to "share"
our knowledge, music, and love. Unfortunately, the local community never caught onto it. So we eventually
just went back to calling ourselves Bay Area DanceSafe. Photos courtesy of Phoenix Llanes (the one in the
dark blue t-shirt) at "Wish," hosted by the Skills crew at Maritime Hall in San Francisco - June 2, 2001
"Pandemonium," a dance party held at the MLK Student Center Bldg on the Berkeley campus.
Students for Sensible Drug Policy also had a table set up next to us. - April 6, 2001
Photos courtesy of Phoenix Llanes
At an outdoor campout party about 3 hours out of the Bay Area - August 2000. I had only been volunteering for a few
weeks (this was my second event) and since my first training session, 20/20 had been filming everything we were
doing for a story on ecstasy and our organization. They never ended up using any of the footage from the training
I received. Instead, they focused almost entirely on these shots here where we're testing ecstasy at the party.
Since I met the 20/20 producer and was in the story, I'm qualified to say that it turned out to be the most
biased and misleading report I'd ever seen, reinforcing my habit of not watching TV, especially the news.
My friends Brooke and Yun at a free party thrown by the Skills crew - Golden Gate
Park, San Francisco - July 2000. It was at this event that we first met and where I
signed up to attend a volunteer orientation. And my life was never the same again...