Rehearsal Nights in Flushing: The Immigrant Moms Who Found Their Second Act in ABBA

The basement of a nail salon in Flushing is not where you'd expect to find the next great ABBA tribute act. But every Tuesday night, after the last customer leaves and the chairs are stacked, that's exactly where the Dream Dreamers set up: a keyboard on a folding table, a karaoke machine duct-taped to a speaker, and five women in their 50s and 60s running through the chorus of "SOS" for the fourth time.

"Again," says Mei-Lin Chen, 61, the band's de facto leader and, by day, the salon's co-owner. "My 'again' is too flat. Again."

How It Started

The band came together the way most things do in Flushing — through a chain of aunties. Chen had mentioned to a customer that she'd loved ABBA as a teenager in Taiwan, back when a cousin brought home a cassette that made the rounds of her entire apartment building. The customer mentioned her sister-in-law sang at church. The sister-in-law recruited a friend who ran a pho restaurant in Elmhurst. Within a month, there were five of them, and someone's nephew had donated a bass guitar nobody fully knew how to play.

"We are not musicians," Chen says, laughing. "We are mothers who do not want to go home at eight o'clock."

The name came from a mishearing of "Dancing Queen" that stuck. Nobody has suggested changing it.

Music From the Years Before Everything

For all of them, ABBA belongs to a specific window of life — the years before marriage, before immigration paperwork, before children and double shifts and mortgages in Queens. Several of the women grew up in countries where Western pop arrived on vinyl through unofficial channels: a radio program broadcast at odd hours, a record passed hand to hand, a movie theater that showed ABBA films years after their release.

"When I hear 'The Winner Takes It All,' I am nineteen and I am doing homework in my mother's shop in Seoul," says Grace Park, 58, the band's reluctant but surprisingly powerful lead vocalist. "My English was not good. I learned English from this album, honestly. Now my English is better than my Korean and I still know every word."

Hanh Nguyen, who sings harmony and plays tambourine with an intensity that has occasionally startled neighbors, puts it more simply: "This music is from before we were tired."

The First Gig

That's why nobody was more surprised than the Dream Dreamers themselves when they got booked. The BID director for a Queens street festival had heard about the band through the same auntie network, watched a shaky phone video of a rehearsal, and offered them a Saturday afternoon slot between a lion dance troupe and a youth hip-hop collective.

Leading up to the festival, rehearsals got serious. The karaoke machine was supplemented by a real amplifier. The nephew's bass guitar was finally tuned. Chen's daughter, a music ed student at Queens College, transcribed chords for them after decades of the band learning songs strictly by ear.

"My mother has been telling me to practice piano since I was six," says Lily Chen, 24. "Now I'm telling her. The circle of life is a joke and the joke is ABBA."

Performance Day

On festival day, the Dream Dreamers took the stage in matching white blouses — a compromise after a group text debate about sequins that lasted eleven days. The crowd was small at first: festival wanderers, a few curious faces, a cluster of family members waving handmade signs.

Then came "Dancing Queen."

Something shifted. Women near the stage — some of them clearly of the same generation, some clearly the daughters of that generation — started singing along. Phones came up. A man who turned out to be a retired music teacher from Bayside asked if they took requests. By the final chorus, the area in front of the stage was fuller than it had been for acts twice as polished.

"I looked out and I saw aunties dancing," Park said afterward, still catching her breath. "Not watching. Dancing. I thought, oh. Oh, this is what it feels like."

What Comes Next

The band has since been invited to play a Lunar New Year event, a church fundraiser, and — the booking they're most nervous about — a wedding.

Chen insists the Dream Dreamers have no ambitions beyond their borough. But she also admits they've started rehearsing a new song, and that she caught herself humming it while doing a customer's gel nails.

"People think we do this because we miss our youth," she says, packing the keyboard back into its case. "We do it because Tuesday night is the only night that belongs to us. And on Tuesday night, we are not anyone's mother. We are the band."

The lights go off in the basement. The folding chairs go back against the wall. And somewhere above, the salon's sign goes dark over a street where, for one afternoon this fall, five moms from Flushing were, indisputably, the dancing queens.