Gonna Wash That Foam Right Outta My...

by Andrea Mulder-Slater

Straight from the Who-the-Heck-Thought-of-This-and-More-Importantly-Why? files we have Foam Dancing - a groovy craze which originated in Spain.

A throwback to the days when those wacky Romans indulged in the odd before-dinner orgy, a foam party involves lining a nightclub dance floor with something akin to rubber pool toys, and dumping ten thousand tons of frothy suds on scantily clad patrons, who I might add, pay for the privilege and sign I-will-not-sue-you-if-I-slip-and-die forms. No really, club owners from Houston to Detroit take their establishments, throw a plastic wall on the floor and using a modified artificial snow machine, blow foamy bubbles all over the place.

Club Amnesia - an incredibly trendy bar in Miami Beach Florida - was one of the first North American clubs to offer "Foam Nights". One such evening (it was a Thursday) was detailed by a party go-er, "Within minutes, they were up to their waists in a sea of bubbles groping each other." Gives new meaning to laundry day hmmm?

But, foam dancing is not all fun and games because as we all know, a direct result of doing anything that feels good is death... or something like that.

It seems that when this whole soapy trend was just taking off, some young lads in Houston, Texas sustained some rather serious injuries after an evening of dancing in several feet of foam.

According to the doctors who treated them, the men had various degrees of keratoconjunctivitis (eye injuries of a serious nature).

The revellers were treated and all was sort-of OK in foam dancing land once more. However, from that point on, fellas were slightly concerned with the fact that they might leave their house with a fully functioning wee willy wonka, but come home with alkaline chemical burns all over their fairweather johnsons.

It doesn't take the intelligence of dish detergent to understand that if you hopped into an industrial strength front loading washing machine wearing nothing but a smile and writhed around for three to ten hours, you might experience some not-so great effects, like a tummy full of Tide, missing socks and an overwhelming urge to... rinse.

Image: Patrons at a Foam Party. Taken at "Tequila Nightclub" in Calgary, Canada. Source: Carl Roett / HyperLight Research