The Friday night dance party takes place on an I-80 overpass in Berkeley, a daytime protest hotspot, transforming the bridge into a glowing display of support for the Bay Area community and those protecting democracy, while urging an estimated 12,000 cars per hour to "honk" in solidarity.

Since January, a group of local residents of all ages called NICE (Not ICE), spearheaded by activist Jennifer Quinn, have been donning their frog costumes and glo-sticks and heading to the I-80 pedestrian overpass in Berkeley (at University Avenue) for a weekly, disco-style "Visibility Dance Party" every Friday night.

“Bring the kids, snacks to share, a community spirit, bubbles, delights, twinkle lights, bring your art, and come as you are,” says the group’s Indivisible page.

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As the SF Standard reports, the overpass is a popular, long-held hotspot for holding protests due to its high visibility — the group’s Indivisible page estimates 12,000 cars fly under the bridge every hour.

“Every honk is somebody saying, ‘Yes, we agree,’” Quinn told KPIX. “We are here to protect our democracy and our community, and this is just a really fun way to do that.”

Quinn told KPIX the concept was first spawned by a costume joke last Halloween. She then attended a daytime protest on the bridge in January and met Indivisible East Bay volunteer Maria Shanle. The two came up with the idea to transform the space at night when the bridge is essentially empty, but the freeway below is highly active, per the Standard.

The organizers aim to keep the event bright and accessible for everyone, especially families.

It’s “something new and fresh for the drivers,” Shanle told the Standard, as she handed out treats and strobe lights to attendees. “A very positive, open, welcoming and family-friendly environment.”

The dance party format helps bring people together from all walks of life.

“There’s an interesting confluence of energy that’s taking place here,” Vera Chang, a professor of environmental justice at St. Mary’s College, who attended the dance party with her family, told the Standard. “People are reaching deep inside themselves for reasons to have hope and to generate change.”

“The idea of going to protest is really intimidating to a lot of people, even if people feel strongly about the encroachment of tyranny,” said Quinn.

Quinn told the Standard she’s looking to hire a DJ who can “make teenagers dance,” and she hopes to inspire people to make new connections at the dance party.

“NICE stands for ‘now it counts everyone.’ Now, everyone's got to show up. Got to show up for community,” Quinn told KPIX. “And you can start here and make some friends.”

Image: Indivisible

"Somebody just came and dropped off this whole bag of cassettes," Jim Hopkins says, showing me a plastic grocery bag full of hand-labeled tapes sitting in the corner of the DJ booth at 440 in the Castro, where he is the midweek resident. He's recently been working on a new project, the SF Disco Preservation Society, and he's taken on the somewhat thankless but admirable task of transferring two decades' worth of club mixes from local nightlife luminaries like Larry Reed, Ellen Ferrato, David Harness and others from analog tape to digital, and uploading them to his website where you can now listen to them — and work out to them — for free. "A lot of these guys are getting up in years," Hopkins tells SFist, "and this is stuff that shouldn't be lost."

The art of the club mix — equal parts curation, imagination, and rhythmic skill — is something that's evolved over the decades in different ways in different cities, with DJs finding influences both locally and internationally. But before the explosion of file-sharing in the early 2000s and the widespread accessibility of digitized music a few years later, DJ sets were things you only ever experienced live in the nightclubs themselves, unless your friend was a DJ and copied a cassette for you — or unless that DJ was famous enough to have a record label and a few CDs.

Hopkins wants people who went to SF nightclubs like Pleasuredome, the I-Beam, and the EndUp back in the day to be able to hear some of these multi-hour mixes that they may only have the haziest memories of, and he wants to introduce a new generation of DJs and nightlife mavens to the talents of their forebears.

Hopkins is also trying to preserve San Francisco's place in disco history. "Clubs such as The Trocadero Transfer, Dreamland, City Disco, and The I-Beam were the places to hear the best disco music," as he told SF Weekly in an interview last fall, adding that the city has "always maintained a tradition of high-energy dance places" which continues today.

He recalled for SF Weekly how he saw his first DJ, in a mirrored, octagon-shaped booth, at a disco in Roseville, California called Marmalade Max, when he was 13 in 1978. From there, he convinced his dad to buy him two turntables and a mixer from Radioshack, and soon he'd be spinning in and haunting the clubs in San Francisco.

The SFDPS also has a Facebook page with a trove of amazing historic nightlife photos and nightclub flyers.

So far there are a couple hundred DJ mixes uploaded to the 1980s and 1990s sections of the SF Disco Preservation Society website, all downloadable and embeddable using the HeartThis app, and available to stream for free.

This all started when Hopkins bought an old reel-to-reel deck a few years ago and answered an ad from a woman whose dad was a DJ and who had a bunch of old reel-to-reel tapes she wanted digitized. She couldn't pay to have it all done, so Hopkins said he'd do it if he could keep the tapes in return.

Says Hopkins, "[I'm] always looking for rare DJ mixtape collections on reel-to-reel, and cassette, to preserve and archive to digital for future generations." And he adds that if you have a collection, he'd also be happy to borrow it, digitize it, and return it promptly.

A few more fun examples below.

Related: Does Anyone Go Out Anymore?: San Francisco Nightlife In The Age Of Netflix And Chill

For immediate release: Public relations firms / publicists of the Bay Area, your SFist editor will no longer accept Facebook, Evite, Eventbrite, email, and/or engraved paper invitations*. All invites must now arrive to SFist in glorious disco ball form, like this one for June's San Francisco Symphony's Black & White Ball, preferably encased in plexiglass and somehow involving glittery confetti. Thank you.

This year's Black & White Ball, the city's massive every-other-year bash at Civic Center, will boast the likes of Paul Simon, Cyndi Lauper, Janelle Monáe, the Drifters, Brenna Whitaker and her Little Big Band, and Super Diamond. For more details and ticket information, visit SFSymphony.

* Totally kidding. Please keep sending us invites. Alas, we're suckers for an open bar.

MUSIC: Kenyan-born, San Francisco-based musician-activist Sila headlines the 2011 Afrofunk Festival, which benefits CARE, a humanitarian aid organization working to improve conditions in the horn of Africa. Black Nature, an original member of the Sierra Leone Refugee All-Stars will also take the stage, along with DJ Jeremiah aka “Mr. Afrobeat,” a native of Liberia who began DJing during his time in an Ivory Coast refugee camp. (8 p.m., Brick and Mortar, 1710 Mission)

PARTY: SF IndieFest presents its annual SF IndieFest Roller Disco Costume Party. Try out your new Halloween costume early and get ready to get your "Super Freak" on. (8 p.m., CELLspace, 2050 Bryant Street)

BAR CRAWL: We were starting to wonder where all the bar crawls had gone, but never fear -- the undead will be meeting up at Civic Center for the SF Zombie Bar Crawl, which will head up toward Nob Hill for some drinks. (7 p.m., Civic Center Plaza, McAllister and Polk)

We touched on this in SFist This Weekend, but seeing as how San Francisco beatifies former San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, here's a rundown of Harvey Milk Day events. Really, Harvey Milk Day (heretofore known to Tea Party ilk as "Homosexual Indoctrination Day"), should include more than just downing a few frozen comsos at Havey's.

Check it:

10 a.m.: Rally at the LGBT Center (1800 Market), where Senator Mark Leno, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, District 8 Supervisor Bevan Dufty, gay activist Cleve Jones, and others will speak. What's more, Humphry Slocombe will create a special flavor of ice cream that attendees will get to taste. Following the rally, participants will go door-to-door in neighborhoods that supported Prop. 8 "to build support for marriage equality through one-on-one conversations." Details here and here.

8 p.m.: Grab your poppers, platforms and a bullet of blow for a 1970s-themed celebration for Harvey’s birthday at the Lookout (3600 - 16th Street at Market/Noe). There will be a costume contest, cake, dancing, peace, love and most importantly, disco. Details.

Know of another other Milky events? Do let us know in the comments.