Still hung up on ‘Confessions on a Dance Floor’

It was the kind of moment SF party photog Shutterslut would have loved to catch: pop rapture in transit, a scene too fleeting and too tender to ever land on film.

After the ball dropped on New Year’s Eve 2005—somewhere around a quarter to two—the F Market streetcar, crammed with strangers, clattered down Market Street. Rene and I had slipped out of Nicole’s epic Duboce Park bash, which I’d DJed, before ending up at the freshly minted 440 Castro for a nightcap.

Then came the call I’d been hoping for, from someone I’d only just started seeing, the kind of new spark that makes your chest thrum like you’ve swallowed a disco ball. They wanted to meet up. I didn’t know yet that the whole thing would burn as fast and bright as Tara’s gourmet grilled cheese dippers from the party, then collapse into heartbreak just weeks later. In that tiny window, everything still felt possible.

Not ready to let the night slide into the usual bus-ride-home buzzkill, I pulled out my 5th-gen iPod Classic, handed Rene one headphone, tucked the other into my ear—a ritual we’d perfected all year—and scrolled to the song that had rewired my brain since its release two months earlier: Madonna’s “Hung Up,” the glittering heartbeat of Madonna’s fall masterpiece Confessions on a Dance Floor.

That album—built as one continuous DJ mix with zero ballads, zero breathers—had already turned countless living rooms and taxis into makeshift nightclubs. It opens with “Hung Up,” all ABBA panic and ticking-clock urgency, Madonna chanting “Time goes by so slowly” like someone who absolutely cannot wait one more minute for the person she wants. It was the perfect emotional shorthand for what I was feeling: impatient, hopeful, slightly ridiculous, and fully alive.

Underneath that opener spins the album’s whole glitter galaxy: “Get Together” beaming out star-gazer optimism; “Sorry” delivering multilingual attitude with a hair flip; “Future Lovers” gliding in on cosmic pheromones; and “I Love New York” stomping around with bratty, glam-punk swagger. Even the deep cuts—the swirling confession of “Let It Will Be,” the breath-close ache of “Forbidden Love,” and the mystical desert wind of “Isaac”—gave the record emotional terrain both celestial and painfully human. It was a guidebook for a night out, a future breakup, a revelation, and a reinvention.

But right then, rattling down Market, it was just the two of us—me lit up with new-crush voltage, and Rene giving me that patient, seen-it-all-before look only a longtime friend can. As that ABBA sample surged in, bleeding into the first ecstatic chorus—“Every little thing that you say or do / I’m hung up, I’m hung up on you”—our feet tapped in sync.

By the second verse, magic slipped in sideways. “Ring, ring, ring goes the telephone” arrived just as the trolley chimed its own ding, ding, ding. Something cracked open in me. I started singing, quietly and shakily. Rene joined immediately, more amused and delighted by the moment than my romantic delusion.

The song built, and so did we. By the time the bridge hit—“I can’t keep on waiting for you”—we were belting. I kept glancing around to make sure we weren’t driving anyone up the wall, only to find passengers smiling back—faces warm in the reflection of the windows.

Then it happened. The next chorus rolled in, and a voice behind us joined. Then another across the aisle. One by one, the whole F Market transformed into a wobbling, late-night choir—strangers knitting their voices together until the streetcar became a rolling cathedral of joy barreling down Market Street. For a few ethereal seconds, every barrier dissolved. No scenes, no cliques, no too-cool-for-school attitude. Just a bunch of tipsy San Franciscans belting Madonna like it was a civic responsibility.

I didn’t know it then, but our little Market Street eruption mapped almost perfectly onto the album’s emotional spine. “Get Together” would’ve been next—Madonna at her most starry-eyed, insisting strangers really can sync up. “Sorry” followed in the tracklist, all bounce and boundary-setting—a breakup anthem I’d later lean on way more than I wanted to. Deeper in sat “Jump,” the neon-lit shove telling listeners to make it happen. And the closer, “Like It or Not,” was Madonna’s velvet shrug of a kiss-off: Take me or leave me, I’m still here.

But none of that mattered in the moment. This wasn’t a prophecy, foreshadowing, or a lesson about heartbreak. It was accidental communion—unplanned, unperformed, and unrepeatable. 

Flash mobs weren’t a thing yet, and corporate karaoke trolleys weren’t clogging the streets. This was strangers caught in the same breath and collision of joy, pulled forward by a chorus that refused to be ignored. When we stepped off the streetcar and Rene walked me home to meet my date, I felt a weird tug to go back—to that moving choir, to the warm hum of voices, to whatever tiny fire we’d accidentally sparked.

The relationship that had me buzzing that night didn’t last. It fizzled, then shattered, and took my heart with it. But that streetcar moment—that bright, communal, shimmering eruption—stayed intact.

Twenty years later, listening to Confessions on a Dance Floor: Twenty Years Edition—with its 20 tracks, long-lost B-sides, nebula of remixes, and the original continuous mix finally streaming—threw me right back into that night. “Future Lovers” sounded as seductive as the promise I felt; “Forbidden Love” hit with the ache of what never fully formed; and “Isaac” drifted in like a prayer I didn’t know I’d whispered.

But it was “Hung Up” that transported me completely: back to Rene, to the trolley, to that midnight choir, and to the person whose name I’ve forgotten but whose timing I remember exactly.

In the two decades since, I’ve lived through more love and loss than I could’ve imagined—relationships that remade me, heartbreaks that reshaped me, and whole seasons of joy and collapse. And San Francisco changed, too: clubs vanished or rebranded, friends scattered, Market Street softened into memory, and the city’s feral, communal spark grew harder to find between tech shuttles and rising rents.

But hearing Confessions on a Dance Floor again carried me right back to who I was on that F Market streetcar before everything shifted—hopeful, open, and singing with a car full of strangers as if nothing could break us. For a few minutes, the music didn’t just remind me of the past—it let me inhabit it again, in a version of San Francisco that felt infinite.