The man behind the world’s largest disco
Story and photos by Nancy J. Parisi
 |
|
The World’s Largest Disco in action.
|
On a memorable Saturday night in 1993, Dave Pietrowski and a car full of pals were looking for Thanksgiving-weekend fun, but they found nothing but a couple of less-than-festive gin mills and a few dark hotel ballrooms and nightclubs. There were no rollicking good times to be had.
Pietrowski, a local businessman and lifelong charity volunteer, vowed to change those party prospects. And the next year he succeeded. In 1994, post-Thanksgiving Saturday night found the concrete expanse of downtown’s Buffalo Niagara Convention Center transformed into the thumping, polyester-dense, World’s Largest Disco charity event.
At his first WLD, Pietrowski expected perhaps 600 enthusiasts looking for a post-family-gathering break to hustle the night away. Three times that number were admitted and several hundreds more were turned away at the doors. The numbers exploded even more the following year. This first WLD was a sloshy affair with emphasis on draft beers—lots of draft beers. Some bon vivants showed up in vintage wear, but it was nothing like today’s event, where faux ’fros, sky-high platform shoes, pastel tuxes, and complicated prints are de rigeur.
 |
|
Founder Dave Pietrowski.
|
WLD features a cavalcade of recorded disco hits (each song has a sponsor and both title and sponsor name are displayed on one of two large screens flanking the party’s stage) interspersed with onstage appearances by the year’s featured disco-era celebrities, dancers, and a performance of “YMCA” (the WLD version of the seventh-inning stretch).
The overarching good vibe of this large-scale extravaganza is that this party benefits Camp Good Days & Special Times, a summer camp and year-round event-planning non-profit for children with cancer. When Pietrowski developed WLD, he knew it had to have a charitable mission, and his wife, who lost a brother to cancer when she was young, suggested them. Today, Pietrowski houses Camp Good Days in offices adjacent to his place of employment, LoVullo Associates on Transit Road. During our interview he mentions that this past September he arranged for thirty-three campers to go to the Hillary Duff concert at Darien Lake.
To date, Conesus Fest for Charity, the name of Pietrowski’s nonprofit that produces WLD, has given one million dollars to Camp Good Days. After paying the party bills, one-hundred-percent of the proceeds go to the camp; everyone working WLD is a volunteer and on the day of the event, an army of 500 staffs the bars, decorates, and cleans up. Pietrowski hires “an overabundance of security; there are five times what any other event has, but as a result we have no trouble with 7,000 people on a packed dance floor all night long.”
WLD also showcases a large collection of seventies memorabilia, a changing line-up of Buffalo sports stars, as well as opportunities for attendees to purchase Polaroids of themselves with the featured celebrities—and all those proceeds are donated. This year, the featured celebrity will be announced the morning of the event; in the past, Brady siblings, a Partridge (beloved loose cannon Danny Bonaduce), the Hanson Brothers (recall the B-movie Slap Shot), and Love Boat staffers have basked in the glow of their Buffalo fans’ adoration.
 |
After the disco balls have stopped rotating and all the glitter is swept up, Pietrowski pays the local vendors with whom he has long-term working relationships, and basically begins work on next year’s WLD. The key to the event’s success, he doesn’t hesitate to say, is that the event is always fine-tuned: “We send out a survey and ask for comments; we ask what we could do to make it better. It doesn’t get any better without that.” He says community groups ask for advice for throwing successful benefits and he emphasizes the need to “do something different, unique—everyone does a walk, an auction, a black tie or whatever; if it’s different, people will remember that.”
And his hot tip for anyone throwing a party? “Don’t run out of anything; get enough glasses, liquor, ice. You have to have enough plates. At my house parties we use china; I can’t stand paper plates.” A good pointer for both mammoth functions and smaller parties: “Make sure you have enough garbage cans. We have a hundred; people won’t walk around ten other people to get to a garbage can. That night we have people constantly cleaning up … it’s like that seventies commercial with the crying Indian. We don’t want to make the Indian cry; don’t litter.” Pietrowski also stresses repeatedly that he doesn’t want revelers waiting in lines for anything. This year he has additional ticket booths, portable bathrooms, and bars.
Another new feature for 2007 is a half-ton fiberglass platform shoe. The colorful art piece was created three years ago for a seventies-themed exhibition in San Francisco sponsored by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. This mega-shoe has been autographed, Pietrowski says, by James Brown and Parliament Funkadelic and is now owned by Conesus Fest for Charity. It will be on view at WLD, where it will be an excellent backdrop for many a party snapshot. The impresario can’t help quipping, “As Ed Sullivan always said, ‘It’s going to be a really big shoe.’”
Nancy J. Parisi has been a journalist and photojournalist in Buffalo for two decades and in 2005 completed an MFA at Parsons School of Design.
Back to the Table of Contents
Back to Top