A curious thing happened in America last night. With a stomach full of red wine, I entered the University of Vermont's new and sterile Davis Student Center and was greeted with a heaving, sweaty mob. I looked around the room and saw several hundred young, smiling faces. Faces from Peabody, Massachusetts; St. Albans, Vermont; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Oxford, Connecticut. Young female students in bright, sparkling leggings, neon colors and glow sticks gyrating, pushing and shaking along with young men in tight jeans and day-glo sunglasses. One hundred of us poured onto the stage clamoring to get close to this madman Gregg Gillis, hunched over a laptop on a plastic folding table. Digital cameras and cell phones extended by all to snap tangible evidence. In the middle of this trendy, dancing mosh pit, my hands found their way to uncouth places. Nobody cared. A click of the mouse and we were shaking our asses to Elton John's "Tiny Dancer" mixed with "Juicy" by Notorious B.IG.! A bloop and a bleep and we got down to Bell Biv DeVoe's "Do Me!" mashed with George Michael's "I Want Your Sex"! The mad scientist's computer was protected from flying sweat and water by Saran Wrap. With a drunk girl draped over his back and his long wet hair shrouding his face, he raced through Stevie Wonder's "My Cherie Amour," "Schizophrenia" by Sonic Youth, "Hard to Handle" by The Black Crowes, and James Brown's "Funky Drummer." Each beat was deftly matched with the next. Every song, bridge, chorus and bass line was the perfect choice every time. Every one of us was hurtling through the dark American night together with a foolish grin on our face. Gillis brought the room up to a frenzy and then finally let us back down. The house lights came on bright and quick. The drunkenness had been danced out of my system. With my head hurting, my hat missing and a little dizzy, I took a look around the room-the smiling faces from Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts bore the same haggard countenance that I'm sure my face did. I walked outside and Vermont's cold winter slapped me in the face and made me feel foolish and vulnerable. Smoking a cigarette and walking down the ice-covered Main Street sidewalk I still couldn't quite understand how one man with a laptop can move people like that. The girls walking behind me cracked jokes about fellatio and bad hangovers. Later on, at around closing time in a brewpub filled with sad-eyed old hippies and bleary-eyed young ones, I told my friend that I want to be a DJ.