The first problem was the business cards.
Yelena Meytes had taken a handful of DJ lessons. She had a controller. She practiced at home. She had even played a few small gigs, if one was willing to call them gigs, which Meytes wasn’t entirely sure she was. Then her husband made her a logo and decided that what his wife needed next was a stack of business cards.
Meytes was horrified.
“I got so upset with him,” she remembers. “I said, ‘I am not soliciting. I am not bringing these business cards.’”
The cards implied an ambition she wasn’t quite prepared to claim. Meytes had a job, a serious one. A clinical social worker by training, she works full-time at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, where she oversees academic advising in health policy and management. She also has two children. Her husband is a surgeon. There was a household to run, careers to manage, children to raise. She wasn’t trying to reinvent herself as an entrepreneur. In fact, when the word is suggested to her, she practically recoils.
“Entrepreneur is the last thing that I think I would ever call myself.”
She was just playing music.
Except people kept asking her to play more of it.
There is a particular mythology surrounding the discovery of one’s passion. We tend to imagine it arriving early, announcing itself unmistakably, and then demanding a lifetime of pursuit. The violinist picks up a bow at four. The painter fills the margins of her elementary-school notebooks. The future chef spends childhood beside a grandmother at the stove. We like our passions to come with origin stories.
Meytes’s arrived after careers and children and a great deal of responsibility.
She immigrated to the United States when she was five and was raised by a single mother. At 16, she started working. Then came school, her career, marriage, her husband’s medical training, children, and more work. She had always loved music and dancing, but creativity, as something she herself might actively pursue, barely registered.
“I was kinda in survival mode,” she says. “I also wasn’t as confident as I am now.”
A couple of years ago, her husband apparently decided there was something in his wife that required a little coaxing. He bought her DJ lessons. A few months later, her father gave her a DJ controller for her birthday. She took perhaps five or ten lessons and then began teaching herself, practicing whenever life allowed.
Her husband made the logo.
Then came the dreaded business cards.
Eventually, Meytes approached the owner of a local coffee shop – Tenafly’s own Awe & Wonder – she knew and proposed an experiment. She could DJ there, nothing too intense, she explained. Chill music. Afrobeats. A vibe.
The owner said yes.
“And after I did one,” Meytes says, “I got hooked.”
Her friends became the test audience. She played a friend’s daughter’s 13th birthday. She played for four hours at her best friend’s 39th birthday-pool party. Two local couples began showing up at her events so reliably that Meytes refers to them as her “roadies.” Her husband kept nudging. Her friends kept cheering. Eventually, the experiment escaped people’s living rooms.
In recent months, Meytes has started combining DJing with another part of her life she loves: fitness. She connected with a local running group and proposed pairing runs with pop-up DJ sets. She played the reopening of a JCC gym. Other fitness opportunities followed. The combination made sense to her. Music, movement, health, community. These are worlds she understands.
She’s also refreshingly unseduced by the idea that every enjoyable pursuit must immediately become a business.
“I don’t want to perform in restaurants,” she says. She isn’t particularly interested in chasing the standard circuit of DJ bookings. The market is crowded, she points out, and she’s realistic about where she is technically. She has a full-time career and two children; becoming an elite technician would require hours she doesn’t have. What she does trust is her ear.
“I do think that I’m very good in understanding music and vibes and environments that make people happy.”
This may be the most useful definition of what she is doing. Meytes isn’t trying to become someone else. She’s becoming increasingly comfortable with another version of herself.
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Ask what her 16-year-old self, the girl already working and focused on getting somewhere, would make of the woman behind the controller today, and Meytes has an answer.
“She would say, ‘I want to be like you when I grow up.’”
DJing, it turns out, has produced some hazards.
People want to talk.
This is problematic because a DJ who appears to be standing around enjoying herself is, in fact, doing something. Meytes recalls one person approaching her during a set and starting a conversation. She became so absorbed in it that she stopped paying attention to the music.
The song ended.
Nothing followed.
For one terrible little moment, there was silence.
No one seemed to notice.
Meytes noticed.
Her children, meanwhile, are among her most enthusiastic critics. They listen while she practices, give feedback and come to her events. Last summer, she sent them to DJ camp.
“Music is important to our family,” she says.
Meytes and her husband have long loved dance and rave culture, and she speaks about a good dance floor with the seriousness other people reserve for houses of worship. Everyone should experience a rave at least once, she believes: the crowd, the music, the freedom of people moving together and expressing themselves.
This freedom, however, does not extend to whipping long hair into strangers.
Meytes has long hair herself. When she dances, she braids it – basic civilization, she says in jest. She has even taken to Instagram to offer occasional lessons in dance-floor etiquette, including a plea to fellow long-haired women to recognize that boundaries continue to exist once the beat drops.
They exist for men, too.
Gentlemen wishing to stand in the middle of a dance floor and converse are politely directed elsewhere.
“If you want to catch up on your correspondence and if you want to talk about how the market did last night,” she says, “please go to the bar.”
The dance floor is for dancing.
It would be easy to turn Meytes’s story into the familiar tale of a busy mother who finally “made time for herself,” but that feels too tidy. Something stranger and more interesting seems to be happening. DJing has changed her sense of what she is capable of trying.
“Ever since I started DJing, everything seems possible,” she says.
She is learning to ride a bike.
She and a group of close friends have created what she jokingly describes as an “international” dance competition. There has also been a cocktail-making competition. The point, if there is one, seems to be that activities no longer require a compelling justification. Fun has become sufficient.
This newfound appetite for play exists alongside a life that remains quite recognizably Bergen County. Ask Meytes to design her perfect local Saturday and she doesn’t describe anything extravagant. She’d wake up early and walk the track for an hour. She’d come home and make a good breakfast. Then she’d visit some of her favorite small local stores, gathering things to cook outside in the backyard that evening.
There would also be a quick detour to a Korean skincare store, because apparently one must acquire “something fun.”
The day is striking mostly for its ordinariness. Work, family, food, exercise, friends, a little indulgence. And somewhere in this version of adulthood, there is now room for a DJ controller.
There is a tendency, particularly once careers and families have hardened into schedules, to treat new pursuits as projects requiring justification. Is it productive? Could it become a side hustle? Are you good at it? Where is it going?
Meytes still isn’t sure where this is going.
She doesn’t consider herself an entrepreneur. She doesn’t claim to be the most technically advanced DJ. She has a day job she likes. She has children to raise. She has a bicycle she is only now learning to ride.
And those business cards her husband made?
She still doesn’t use them.
It turns out she didn’t need them. She needed the controller.
