When photos of Sean O’Brien dancing at a concert surfaced on anonymous image board 4chan, posters roasted the dancer for his size. The image with the caption, “Spotted this specimen trying to dance the other week. He stopped when he saw us laughing” drew tons of negative taunting, but then something amazing happened. A group of women saw the mean-spirited ridicule and sprung into action, promising to find the “dancing man” and throw him a huge party in Los Angeles. Their goal: Make it clear that bullying is not okay and we should all be free to dance.
With a little help from our friend social media and the hashtag #FindDancingMan on Twitter, the women found O’Brien in Liverpool, England. And this past weekend, the promised party happened!
Around 1,000 people turned up to the event, organized by DanceFree Movement, at the Avalon nightclub in Los Angeles, which also raised money for anti-bullying charities, the BBC reported. Some attendees were prettying cool too…Moby DJ’d the party, anti-bullying campaigner Monica Lewinsky partied with O’Brien, and Pharrell Williams recorded a video message saying he wished he could be there.
The LA efforts raised $70,000 that will go to anti-bullying and positive body image programs.
Commenting on his whirlwind visit, he told the Today show: “It’s something I never thought would ever happen in my life. It’s amazing. What happened to me appeared to touch a lot of nerves. We’ve raised some good money for charity, we’ve got more money coming in. We’re just really trying to help people know that there’s support there.”
“There’ll always be bad in the world but there’s far more good people,” he added.
Check out scenes from the awesome party where partiers danced like everyone was watching.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-ms8stvHJg&w=640&h=360]
