Three days of dancing:
1. On Thursday I started taking a salsa class. The framework for the class is that the leads stand in a big circle with follows switching from person to person. For a moment, moving awkwardly between strange and sweaty palms, I had a vision of the dance scenes in period dramas, of ladies in swishing skirts wafting daintily between partners. Our room was the opposite of that, clutching strangers and apologizing constantly, treading on toes and spinning off-balance, pushing my dampening bangs out of my eyes with a forearm. Slowly, eventually, getting it mostly right.
2. On Friday, two of my very favorite people were djing together, so I put on a new dress and my dancing shoes to match my towering good mood and prepared to get sweaty. Deep into the fun I slipped back out of the crowd and around to the other side of the bar to watch. This is my favorite part of a good party, stepping back to watch my loved ones have fun, dancing and laughing and unselfconsciously silly. Just as I settled down for a good happy wallow something in the technology went wrong and the music came to a crashing halt. Everyone dispersed to buy another drink or mop the sweat from their faces, and by the time it started up again no one remembered that it had ever stopped. Much later that night, in the smoky afterhours, members of the bar staff practiced salsa dancing with me to music that didn't match at all.
3. On Saturday we went to the demolition derby out in Monroe which left us well-placed to stop for a couple of pitchers of beer in nearby Sultan. We settled into a booth in the back flanked by peeling taxidermied deer just before the band picked up their instruments. They swung into covers of the hits from the 70's and 80's and we bopped around in our booth, singing and flailing, drawing amused stares and at least one thumbs up from the group of bikers nearby. Hours later, on the way out, the band cajoled us into staying for one last dance, unexpectedly starting up with Nine Inch Nails's "Closer". We shrugged and peeled our layers back off, almost never able to turn down a dance party, feeling slightly dissonant dancing to that song in that place and happy with all the ways there are to have fun.
1. On Thursday I started taking a salsa class. The framework for the class is that the leads stand in a big circle with follows switching from person to person. For a moment, moving awkwardly between strange and sweaty palms, I had a vision of the dance scenes in period dramas, of ladies in swishing skirts wafting daintily between partners. Our room was the opposite of that, clutching strangers and apologizing constantly, treading on toes and spinning off-balance, pushing my dampening bangs out of my eyes with a forearm. Slowly, eventually, getting it mostly right.
2. On Friday, two of my very favorite people were djing together, so I put on a new dress and my dancing shoes to match my towering good mood and prepared to get sweaty. Deep into the fun I slipped back out of the crowd and around to the other side of the bar to watch. This is my favorite part of a good party, stepping back to watch my loved ones have fun, dancing and laughing and unselfconsciously silly. Just as I settled down for a good happy wallow something in the technology went wrong and the music came to a crashing halt. Everyone dispersed to buy another drink or mop the sweat from their faces, and by the time it started up again no one remembered that it had ever stopped. Much later that night, in the smoky afterhours, members of the bar staff practiced salsa dancing with me to music that didn't match at all.
3. On Saturday we went to the demolition derby out in Monroe which left us well-placed to stop for a couple of pitchers of beer in nearby Sultan. We settled into a booth in the back flanked by peeling taxidermied deer just before the band picked up their instruments. They swung into covers of the hits from the 70's and 80's and we bopped around in our booth, singing and flailing, drawing amused stares and at least one thumbs up from the group of bikers nearby. Hours later, on the way out, the band cajoled us into staying for one last dance, unexpectedly starting up with Nine Inch Nails's "Closer". We shrugged and peeled our layers back off, almost never able to turn down a dance party, feeling slightly dissonant dancing to that song in that place and happy with all the ways there are to have fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment