On Thursday nights in the early 2000s, La Paloma hosted some legendary electronic music sessions. I don't remember the exact time when the venue's lighting dimmed, the colored spotlights came on, and the DJ of the moment took over the mythical Raval dance hall, transformed into a nightclub, but I'm sure it was well into the night.
Often, when the young people of that time began to enter the hall, hungry for party and modernity, with our flashy t-shirts, there were still some retired couples or couples old enough to be, dressed in their festival best, finishing the last bars of a waltz or a pasodoble on La Paloma's large dance floor. Our irruption into the hall announced to them that their time to retire had come, like the twelve chimes for Cinderella. A new generation, ours, was in a hurry to take over La Paloma. They, the older ones or the old ones, could have the afternoon, if they wanted it, it was all theirs, but the night, that moment when it seemed to us that no one saw us and that everything was possible and permitted, belonged to us, the young people.
A quarter of a century later, I have set foot in La Paloma again, and I have done so in the afternoon. Have I gotten older? I'm certainly not the same as twenty-five years ago, but I dare say that afternoons aren't what they used to be either. For some time now, the event producer Locamente periodically organizes a party at La Paloma inspired by 90s television contests called Loco Bongo, and it's doing wonderfully. They sell out a thousand tickets weeks before each session.
The success of the proposal, especially among Barcelonians over forty, is mainly explained by two reasons. The first and most important, the schedule: Loco Bongo opens its doors at five in the afternoon, therefore, those of us who stopped staying up late a long time ago, can go out, dance and have a couple of drinks with friends and, before midnight, have had dinner, watched an episode of a series and be sleeping like angels. The second reason for Loco Bongo's success is the music, mostly great club hits from ten, twenty or thirty years ago, which acts like the Comodines lifting effect spray that, for a while, makes you feel younger (the opposite of reggaeton).
In Barcelona, there are more and more proposals for what until now we called tardeo or, Catalanizing it, tardeig. Termcat, the Centre de Terminologia, now proposes that we call it vespreig and, to me, it seems like a brilliant idea; the proposal to go out in the afternoon and that Catalan speakers do not have to resort to an Anglicism or Castilianism to refer to it. With afterwork or brunch we have already arrived late, but with vespreig I suspect that we are still on time and that it will make a fortune. Let's fully enjoy the vespreig, the afternoon is young!