Oooo! Oooh! Hey, aren't you that guy from MTV?! YES...
In 1991 during the height of my career in the nightclub business I was working in a club in Orlando called The Cuda Bay club. At the time, I had been working in the club business for several years. My partner in crime is known as
Stan "the man" Priest (and he
is still in the business). We had been
together as a DJ and light jock for several years and through many different clubs and cities. We were known as Weird and Feared. During a trade convention called
Lighting Dimension International or LDI for short, we both sat on panels that were open for discussion about our individual art form. I was voted
Lighting Technician of the Year and Stan became a
Billboard ® reporter. In that same year Disney ® teamed up with MTV ® to
stage a state wide dance contest to be held at the newly opened
Pleasure Island club called Mannequins. Since I was given my name WeirDave by another DJ (ThanksSeb!) due to my dancing style and over the years many people would come to the clubs we worked at to see me dance, I decided to enter
after some additional coaxing from my good friend
Michael Goldman who was working for
Disney at the time as their Promotional Director. The contest lasted about a month. There were about 3000+ applicants over the stages. I won my stage and went to the semi's. After winning the
semifinals I had one week until the finals. I was nervous because the songs that they had been picking for the contestants to dance to were not my style. I was hoping that out of all the songs that they were using that I would get lucky enough to get
KLF's
3AM Eternal, which was the best one of the bunch back then for a gothic style person such as myself.
As luck would have it, at the semi-finals, the song I drew
was Marky Mark's Good Vibrations. I was not pleased but as I said I won the semi's so I just kept my fingers crossed
for the finals. At the finals I did get the song I wanted but my shoe flew off during my
audition! I was a little shaken but I was determined so I
kept on dancing and .... I won!!! The Grand Prize was a trip
to NYC to film 15 episodes of
Club MTV!!! These episodes
were the equivalent of 2 YEARS worth of shows and we did it
in 2 days! It was a rush! So now you know how WeirDave
(Weird Dave) ended up on MTV. Occasionally they show an old episode of Club MTV and you just never know you may just see me!
Promotional Shot
(Used for print ads and marketing materials)