Don't Need Booze To Groove

At age 12, K. Giraldo could pass for 16.

She slipped into the hottest clubs in Frankfurt, Germany—the techno capital of the world—and fell into the scene, surrounded by the music, the people and the drugs.

That was where it all began. Dropping ecstasy. Snorting cocaine. Drinking alcohol. She became a drug addict, the now Southampton resident explained last week during a telephone interview.

This facet of herself coincided with her newfound identity as DJ Twilo. There was no way out.

“I didn’t have an exit. It was so dark,” she said. “I was always in that atmosphere—clubbin’, very superficial. I came to the point where I couldn’t show up for my gigs. I had to get myself clean because I was going down.”

On November 11, 2011, Ms. Giraldo sat down at her first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. At the time, the 23-year-old thought she was ending the party too early.

She was wrong.

“I’m telling you, your life becomes 100 times better, maybe 200 times,” Ms. Giraldo, now 25, said. “That’s my experience. You have so much more energy. You don’t feel like the world is pushing you down. You’re pushing up. You don’t need drugs and alcohol to have a good, and I mean a really good, time. I can prove it. I’ll show you.”

On Friday, April 19, DJ Twilo will spin disco classics to German techno at the first-ever, alcohol-free

“DANCE” for adults, age 18 and over, at the Bridgehampton Community House, according to organizer Lisa Bonner, founder of East Hampton-based Hippy Cool Productions. The goal is to address physical, mental and spiritual health on the East End, she said, while creating an environment void of any temptation to drink alcohol—an atmosphere that young people desperately crave.

“There is this whole community that wants to be going out, but they don’t want to drink. They’re over it,” Ms. Bonner explained last week during a telephone interview. “But they end up going to a bar and they end up drinking. So then, next time, they don’t end up going out. They’ve become more and more isolated. This is their chance to come out and just dance.”

Especially at a time when teen drinking is particularly high. According to Suffolk County’s 2010 Youth Development Survey, more than 50 percent of high school seniors, county-wide, are consuming alcohol monthly, and 34 percent of Suffolk’s juniors and seniors are binge drinking more than five drinks in a row in one sitting.

The tourist-driven East End, specifically, is an ideal location for “the perfect storm” of alcohol abuse, according to Kym Laube, director of the Human Understanding & Growth Seminars (HUGS) prevention group in Westhampton Beach. During a telephone interview last week, she said that though her group is not affiliated with the dance, she thinks offering an alcohol-free event is a great idea.

“Simply put, there aren’t a lot of opportunities to socialize without alcohol present,” she said. “A dance like this not only provides a safe, alcohol-free environment for adults to socialize, but it also sends a positive message to our young people that adults, too, can have fun without using alcohol.”

According to Ms. Laube, the factors that contribute to the perfect storm for teens includes tremendous access by way of fully-stocked liquor cabinets and summer jobs in bars and restaurants; some parents simply allowing their children to drink at home; and the challenges law enforcement face to effectively police underage consumption.

There is a perceived lower risk with alcohol, but the reality is that more children die annually from alcohol than all illegal substances combined, Ms. Laube said.

“It’s this idea that we all did it and we were okay, and the truth is, many of us weren’t okay,” she said. “We tell kids all the time to have fun without the use of alcohol, but very seldom do we show them. They role model our behavior. We can’t blame fish for dying after swimming in a polluted pond, just like we can’t blame kids for drinking. This is an adult problem to fix.”

The first step is honesty, Ms. Giraldo said. After hitting rock bottom again and again, there was one night that forced the DJ to take a good honest look at herself.

It began with a distraught phone call from her younger brother, John. He and his girlfriend had just split up and he needed her help. He invited himself over to her house and stepped straight into a party.

“I told him, ‘Don’t worry about doing any of this stuff,’ but he drank and drugged and he completely lost his sense of whatever,” she recalled. “He was in a blackout. And we all fell asleep and he started beating the shit out of us, me and my friend. And we were sleeping and he had no idea this was happening to him. He was just ...”

Ms. Giraldo trailed off into silence.

Her younger brother was arrested and spent the night in jail. And she had put him in that situation, she said.

“He had all this stuff because of my drug and alcohol addiction,” she said. “That was the push for me to be like, ‘You’re f----d up.’ And I think that was the beginning of it. Without AA, I would not be alive. And I wish people would get it.”

In November, DJ Twilo will celebrate three years sober. Three years clearer. Three years with her new life. And three years with her new self.

Hippy Cool Productions will host an alcohol-free “DANCE” on Friday, April 19, at 8 p.m. at the Bridgehampton Community House. Tickets are $20. A portion of the proceeds will benefit the HOM Project, a rock opera slated to be staged in September at Guild Hall. For more information, visit hippycool.com.