The Grateful Dead and VRSA

Yes, there is a connection...

Every town in Portugal has a website where you can find what activities/events are planned for the upcoming month.¹ Often I don’t understand the descriptions I find there … leading to another new experience. Last Saturday night, we ventured to the praça to experience the Glow Party…oh, what a party it was.

Summertime

I’ve written about the many free events local municipalities host each year. I suggested that these events foster a sense of community and connectedness. Towns in the Algarve ramp up the party schedule during the summer months. And this year is no exception.

This year’s Glow Party was supposed to start at 18:00 … but as we live only 1 block from the town square (where a stage had been erected) I can confirm that the music started at 17:30. Yes, the event started EARLY.

At 19:00 I observed two dozen people following a fitness instructor as he led them through a one-hour high-intensity interval training program. They ran across the square 4 or 5 times, then stopped to do 2 dozen jumping jacks before running to begin the next circuit. After this another 90 minutes of music followed by a hip-hop dance show by the local dance school. If you missed the HIIT earlier in the evening, you could participate in a one-hour Zumba class at 22:00 (pictured above) or just wait till 23:00 when the music really cranked up. (Please note: we never stayed up this late when we lived in the US. Not even on New Year’s Eve!)

As you can see, these Glow Parties are not just for children. Nearly everyone waits in line to have their faces and bodies painted with glow-in-the-dark paint or purchase glowing bracelets or eyeglasses.

Grateful Dead

So what does any of this have to do with the Grateful Dead? I’m glad you asked. In researching this post I learned that the chemical reaction that causes sticks to glow was discovered by accident by Edwin A. Chandross, a New York scientist working in Bell Labs.

Whilst investigating luminol’s unusual quality of producing light rather than heat in chemical reactions, he discovered that peroxalate esters were vital to creating chemiluminescence. Over the course of just one day he carried-out experiments to establish exactly which compounds of chemicals would produce light most effectively. The winning combination was Hydrogen Peroxide coupled with oxalyl chloride and dye. This emitted a visible light, which glowed at just 0.1% of the strength of today’s glow sticks. — Glowtopia

Chandross went to his bosses at Bell Lab and suggested they file for a patent. But they took a pass. A few years later, scientists at Stamford found his research and improved his formulation. This led to patents being issued in the 1960s and ‘70s and the US Navy’s recognition of their value as target markers, emergency lights, etc.

However, legend has it that glow sticks emerged on the party scene in 1971 at a Grateful Dead concert. It seems the son of an American Cyanamid factory worker took backpacks filled with glow sticks to a Grateful Dead concert in New Haven, Connecticut. In the middle of the concert, he and his friends started cracking open the glow sticks, handed them out to people in the crowd, and threw them into the air. The band even took note and stopped playing.

And the rest, as they say, is history. There were raves in the ‘80s and ‘90s and children’s parties followed. But, today, throughout Portugal you will find young and old coming together…dancing…exercising…drinking wine or beer…and glowing till the wee hours of the morning.

Até à próxima semana, desfruta da festa,

Nanc

1. To find your câmara’s website enter “cm-[town name].pt. E.g, cm-tavira.pt…or cm-vrsa.pt.