Strut yo’ Stuff

Tuesday April 11th, 2000 @ 8:48 PM

Filed under: Everything, Tales Told Well

A curious activity dancing is. What is it? Moving one’s body to music would be the obvious definition, but what is our motivation for this peculiar motion? Foreplay perhaps? Ego gratification maybe? Resolving something psychologically like crawling does for a baby?

It does seem to be an innate response to music or a rhythmic beat. I’ve seen a toddler standing on a street corner sucking his thumb, hear the startup of our band and immediately get big-eyed and begin to bounce up and down. This little bounce is the universal first dance. I’ve seen these wee humans do the same dance in Turkey and Spain and Fiji.

For some humans, that is as good as they ever get. At forty they are still doing that same little bounce, only it ceased being cute when they were six, and won’t resume being cute until they are seventy-six–the ages where self-awareness seems to be absent. In-between those ages people seem to need alcohol to dance. In ninety percent of the places we play, no one dances the first set. Whoever drinks the fastest will start off sometime in the second set and that gives a few more couples the courage to display their moves. By the third set the floor is usually full and by the end of the evening these same once timid and conservative humans are writhing around on the floor doing “the worm” and “high fiving” the band.

I’ve often wondered at this social phenomenon. Why do people need drink to dance? I think perhaps, it is tied to sexual attractiveness. Dancing is a sexual icebreaker among other things, and we often judge each other’s sex appeal by how we appear and move on the floor and by the confidence we display. The last thing we want to do is to look stupid when everyone is watching. And they do watch. I can be in the midst of the most inspiring harmonica solo I’ve ever played, and if the two most dorky looking hacks in the bar get up and start dancing, I immediately lose my entire audience. Every eye will settle on the uncoordinated bumbling and shuffling of the dancers.

Of course drinking doesn’t make anyone appear less stupid on the dance floor, but it causes a state of vision warp where the picture of themselves in their heads is dramatically different from what the audience is actually seeing. It is sometimes called the: I am a sex machine syndrome. Ironically, if the dancing partner is in the same vision warp, then indeed you are a sex machine, whether reality agrees or not.

However, this is often a one sided dance. Some poor bastard who is divorced and lonely and horny as a satyr, has left a half an hour early from the machine shop to take a shower and wash the grime from his knuckles; then dons his only pressed shirt and puts on half a bottle of Brute aftershave. Now this guy hasn’t danced since he and his first wife were learning the shoddish from his Swedish grandmother at the VASA lodge when they were in sixth grade.

He spies a lady across the room who had to lay down on the bed to get her jeans buttoned, and is wearing enough makeup to spackle a Quonset hut. She is wiggling her torso to the music with a look on her face that announces: “To get anywhere with me boys, you have to ask me to dance.” He sees several other guys with freshly washed knuckles looking at her and reading the same message. He knows he has to act fast. He has left the security of his blue shirt that says “Ed” over the pocket and the comforting sounds of his drill press. His big feet don’t have their roomy steel-toed boots about them and are instead wedged into fake ostrich cowboy boots he bought at a truck stop for thirty-nine bucks.

He frantically runs through his memory for some encouragement and remembers a half-time speech by his high school football coach: “you’ll never be a real man if you can’t get the ball over the goal.” He puffs out his chest and it starts across the floor without his feet, which suddenly seem to have big wet suction cups attached to them. But he does it because he has been laid only once since his divorce. That was to his ex-wife during reconciliation, where, in the heat of passion she confessed to all the men she’d slept with in the last two months, including his poker buddy, Cletis, who wears a prosthesis from the Viet Nam war.

Immediately upon accepting his offer to dance, the woman, an exhibitionist who believes she is an “old soul” re-incarnated seven times starting with Cleopatra, bops unto the floor and begins to dance with herself while making faces of sexual ecstasy exaggerated in glossy lipstick.

The poor bastard awkwardly follows her around trying to place himself somewhere in her line of vision. He feels his neck burning and his face flushing and he decides he ought to start smoking again. He becomes aware of his big hands hanging there wondering what to do. They seem to grow larger and ungainly like Gooney bird wings. The suction cups are getting bigger and he feels worse than he did when his parents had him circumcised at age thirteen. He knows that the other guys with the washed knuckles are laughing at him. The song seems to go on forever as the world shifts into slow motion. He hates the band. “They’re doing this on purpose,” he accuses in the muddle that was once his mind. Meantime, Cleopatra is beaming and thrashing about like a porpoise doing a tail dance over the water at Sea World. The conglomerate gaze of eyes from the crowd caresses her fanny like a warm breeze and she glows with her moment in the sun.

He’ll get his revenge if eventually he wins the prize and weds the bonny lass, because she’ll never get to dance again once he has a ring on her finger. But for now, the poor bastard is in hell, and she is Satan, and the band is a gang of demons and the smirking audience members are the flames licking at his aching feet.

Some girls don’t wait around for the poor bastard to make his move, they just dance together. They like this because it allows them to look good and feel good without having to worry about the advances of the satyr. They don’t have to exchange astrological signs and listen to the male lie about his interest in whatever it is they like: “Re-incarnation? Really, I love re-incarnation! I had a dog once that I swear was my grandmother Gertrude, same look in its eye, same little fuzzy upper lip…”

The girls seldom get to keep their sorority untarnished from leg-hiking males for long, there is always the guy who upon seeing two or three girls dancing, decides to be their savior and come hopping to the rescue. He gets right in the middle and tries to copy whatever dance it is they are doing. He smiles and winks and shoots his thumb and index finger like a gun at his buddies. He’s the guy with the big sweat circles under the arms of his silk shirt and whose e-mail address is “hip_shakin_daddy.”

Hip Shakin’ Daddy is a wannabe leg humper. If one of the girls so much as looks at him he’ll run right over and hump their leg, and if she doesn’t hit him across the lips with a can of mace, he’ll move right around behind her for some prolonged and serious humping.

I’m amazed at how many people think humping is dancing. I like to think that humans dance and dogs hump. Humans are piss poor humpers compared to dogs. I had a Lab named Tigger who could hump both your legs in alternate strokes while holding one paw in the air like a dandy, or so it seemed. But accomplished or not, people love to hump. I’ve seen bars where an invitation to dance was an invitation to hump. Now think about it–isn’t that a bizaare Western World social oddity? Can you imagine doing this anywhere other than at a bar? Picture yourself at Safeway in the beans and tomatoes aisle, when an otherwise self-respecting and nicely dressed stranger comes over to you and says, “Hi there, would you like me to hump your leg for about five minutes?” Spectators would be aghast at your humping and the store manager would probably try to separate the happy couple with the hose he was using to wash the fresh veggies.

I’ve seen a lot of aberrant and humorous departures from our Judeo-Christian culture on the dance floor from my perch above on the stage. I saw a guy at the Grand Targhee ski area do “the lizard.” He squatted precariously on the edge of a chair, holding his arms tight in to his body making hooked three-finger reptile hands, while flicking his tongue and darting his head. Then he leaped high into the air, came down into a stretched out slide and wriggled rapidly all about the room like a giant iguana, dragging his feet, pulling himself forward with his hands. He never left his lizard persona as he scared woman up onto their chairs and slithered about the room faster than a centipede.

There isn’t a dance a human being can achieve anatomically that I haven’t witnessed in our miles around the globe, but the biggest irony came one time in Lander, Wyoming, in a tiny bar. I saw a voluptuous young female enter the room in wearing yellow flowered pedal pushers. That’s the name we used to call very tight pants that came down to mid calf. Her parts oscillated nicely as she moved in the jiggling flower garden and every eye sought the flowers like the flight paths of so many bees. The males begin to drool and the females looked at the flowers to see why their men had suddenly dropped out of what had been a cogent conversation.

This girl had come to dance and dance she did. She was a hoochie coochie style dancer like Charo of eighties Vegas fame. She had a female partner who was dressed in black and wasn’t quite as uninhibited. These two got the wave started and soon the floor was full of dancers, with the men trying to stare at the bopping butt in the yellow flowers, while their women kept trying to dance between the flower child and their mates.

Suddenly I was overcome with nausea and the urge to gag rose in my throat. A gaseous invasion of my sinuses had left me weak-kneed. It was so bad that I seemed to be viewing the audience through hallucinogenic waves like a mirage on the desert. I looked around at the band members to see if any of them was concealing a look of guilt. All were stoic. Obviously they were either good actors or the odor hadn’t reached them yet. But it did. Jason’s eyes came open like he’d been goosed by a python. Chuck drew his head back and flinched like a Catholic Nun had slapped his hands with a ruler. We looked at each other and begin to make the kind of wrinkled faces human beings can only make when something smells bad.

I begin to look around the dance floor for the culprit who I intended to shoot in the face with a seventeenth century Blunderbuss. I glanced about for the usual suspects, like some 300 lb. truck driver with a ship tattooed on his chest, sporting six inches of plumbers crack, an Elvis hairdo, wolfing down a jalopeno Chimichanga, preparing to blast the vinyl off his bar stool.

This was some bad gas folks. This could fumigate cockroaches hiding behind the quarter rounds. I could picture them there writhing on their backs kicking their greasy little legs. I pictured my socks curling down around my ankles. I refused to take my harmonica solo where air intake is voluminous.

I figured if he knew about it, Saddam Hussein would recruit this bad motherfucker to ride around on a camouflaged trailer like a scud missile. Somebody had turned a food processing tube into a bazooka. A scud missile often misses its target, but this poison gas would have the Kurds waving white flags all along the Iraqi border.

I asked Chuck, “Where is Dr. Kevorkian when you need him?” Some priest should have entered with an iron cross and a whip of rosary beads to force a confession. Not a sissy priest, but a crazed monk with a sour stomach and a tooth ache–a throwback to the inquisition who would administer a forty-five minute ass whipping for penance. I’m not sure God Almighty in all his mercy could forgive such an unmitigated and unconscionable olfactory assault. If this wasn’t sin, then the Pope is a Mormon penguin visiting door to door on the south pole.

Whoever it was would not give up the attack. Finally the dance floor began to clear and to my horror only the two girls were left. I called a break. They came to talk to me. Which one was it? Another wave boiled up to the surface from its cauldron and I had had it. I knew one of the girls was guilty and the other one thought it was me. Now I’m as gracious as the next guy, but I would be damned if I was going to be a martyr for this broad’s cause. I spoke up, and in one precious breath said, “You girls are going to have to step outside and one of you needs to confess to the other because if you cut loose one more time you’re going to kill me.”

There it was. The flowered pedal-pusher girl frantically called the other one outside in embarrassment. “Oh no, not the flower of humanity,” I thought. “Whatever happened to sugar and spice and everything nice?” I was dismayed and disillusioned. Why couldn’t it have been the Elvis trucker? The world was not running in its greased tracks, something was out of kilter. Whatever cook fed that poor girl needed to be put in the town stocks where every male who ever fantasized about the purity and loveliness and inviolable nature of ladyhood could walk by each day for a week and slap this nasty dude’s face.

Oh, the dance floor! What extremes of human nature are displayed there! For myself, I like the symbolism of a smooth transfer from normal person to dancing person. It is symbolic of the changing faces of mankind in our many roles. To just jump out of character violates the chameleon in us–the multi-faceted wonder that is a human being. I both hate yet enjoy when a person stands pensively on the sidelines watching the band, then upon entering the dance floor, walks stiffly to the center and suddenly turns into a flopping Albatross from bizarro world. It never ceases to make me smile or break out into laughter.

I like approaches, cool approaches. So cool that imperceptibly the human transforms into dancer and back again to human so that we the onlooker can’t tell where one begins and the other leaves off. This is a practiced art. A subtle snapping of the fingers, a slight facial gesture, a bounce emerging in the step and then–there they are, dancing, and nobody knew how they got that way.

I once saw a couple who never left the dance floor. They seemed to have always been there. The man was an old gray cowboy wearing an even older grayer hat with a curled up brim. His pants were several inches too short and his worn socks had fallen. He had no expression on his face. Neither did she, an Indian lady near his age, who was probably half African-American. She had on a dress that went out of style with Dixie cups that had pictures on the lids. She sported a hat with a black net veil pulled up over her forehead. They gently held each others finger tips and swayed back and forth to the music. Next to them a lady lay on the floor wiggling, wriggling, and giggling, looking up at her partner who just stood there dumbfounded.

The old couple never changed their dance. If the beat sped up they moved in half-time. Between songs they just stood there holding finger tips. A strange ritual to be sure, but I leaned forward and studied them, and found meaning in their dance. Past experiences had scarred these two human beings and left them afraid and confused and lonely–very lonely. I thought about us all, riding this tiny planet in the gargantuan dark and quiet universe. We the people, so short-lived and fragile, so easily vain, yet so quickly desperate. Facing old age and regret, frailty and illness, and the mysteries after death, all by oneself, is enough to make you insane. And, indeed these two pitiable creatures were crazy.

The dance was in Evanston, Wyoming, at the State Mental Hospital–for the residents there. For these two forgotten people, life had slowly eliminated those who had loved them and touched them. Alone and bewildered in a foreign place they had never intended to be, they reached out to each other when they heard the music and begin to dance their tiny step. Somewhere in the strange confusion, or dormancy, or damaged cognizance of their minds, a comfort crept. A minute transference of love that said to the other, “I understand…”

I sat on a folding chair in the shadows of the old gymnasium and stared at this couple and pondered, lump in throat, about the strength that neither dancer had for himself, yet could somehow give the other. The lines etched into their faces spoke to me of tragedy, sorrow, defeat, and fear, but the countenance that glowed so delicately through, unveiled the joy that warmed their hearts and mine like so many fading embers in a hearth long abandoned. They were still dancing when I left. It was the sanest activity I’d seen on the dance floor in many months and left me heartened that perhaps there is hope for us yet.

Posted by Carl