I never went to TAO in my youth, but I did go last month for a Backstreet Boys concert afterparty,…read morealso known as millennial mom's night out. My friends and I were on the dance floor several hours after bedtime, and we had an absolute blast.
We wandered over from the Sphere and found a short line outside the club, manned by a guy with a guest list, but it turned out that all we needed to do to get in was pay a $20 cover. We got special wristbands that presumably marked us as middle-aged, and they entitled us to unlimited well drinks between 11:30 and 12:30.
The club was pretty happening when we walked in, but we were able to get up to the bar quite easily. It wasn't quite 11:30, and the bartender advised us to wait to get our free drinks. She didn't seem to mind us hanging out like vultures, and served us the minute the party hour began. We annoyingly had three different well drinks--tequila tonic, tequila soda, and gin and tonic, I believe--and she remembered them when we came back for a second, and then a third round. She was, in other words, a beautiful bartending angel. She was great at her job and kept things moving. I was surprised how easy it was to get our drinks in this busy club.
The DJ knew his audience, and I recognized every song he played, the whole set plucked from my middle school, high school, or young adult years, when I would occasionally go clubbing in Vegas. I was with two of my best friends, who I met when I was 12, and wore knock-off Herve Leger to go dancing with when I was 21. We're 40 with kids now, but Tao took us back to those carefree days. We got low in our flat shoes and loose-fitting white clothes.
Sometime after midnight, the crowd started getting younger, and we were flattered when a nice boy asked if one of us would dance with his shy 21-year-old friend, apparently not realizing we were old enough (technically) to be his mothers. Then, around 1:15, we acknowledged that none of us had recognized the last few songs. The DJ was finally smoking out the millennials.
We were so exhilarated and energized that we ended up going to our hotel bar, then ordering room service and staying up until 4 in the morning. I'll never forget this night of revelry, the Sphere and the pizza sleepover, the hours of dancing at Tao. Maybe we'll come back in our 60s, when the Backtsreet Boys do their 50th anniversary tour.