Ladies and gentlemen, I am ready to open up about a subject that is near and dear to my heart. This is probably not the best follow-up post to the one yesterday considering I mentioned how I sometimes lean sensitive and am not super manly, but it doesn't matter because I have a confession to make. The truth is....(dramatic pause)...I am a dancer! That's right, I love to dance. Not the "jump-out-of-a-cake-at-a-bachelorette-party" type (although I could for a nominal fee), but the lose yourself in the music, funky get down kind of dance. Now, I would encourage you not to confuse a love of dancing with a natural talent for it. In fact, I'm pretty awful. But it doesn't matter because it is the one activity that I've really stopped caring what other people think.
I think my love of dancing probably started in the 80's. I was raised on the hip hop streets of South Dakota where I often had to pop and lock just to survive. My family used to pump Footloose while I spun around on the kitchen floor when I was three or four. I learned to line dance off of an exercise tape along with three other classmates when I was in the 5th grade, and we did it at a concert as the rest of our classmates stood behind us and sang Boot Scootin' Boogie. I even conned one of the girls in my class into taking swing dance lessons with me in high school. There were definitely some years where the dancing shoes hung in the closet, particularly from 7th grade through junior year, when all the guys at the school dances sat on one side of the gym and made fun of the girls on the other, but by the end of high school we started to realize that the more we were on the dance floor (even if it meant just standing there with our hands in our pockets), the more attention we received from the ladies.
Through college I had kind of retreated back into "too-cool-for-school" mode and sat at the table while my friends were out grinding on any girl that backed that thang up. (God, I'm getting old. Just thinking about partying "from the windows to the walls" gives me agita.) I still had the rhythm in me, but it was usually relegated to dancing behind the wheel of my car or Tom Cruise-ing it in the privacy of my own home. I was sure that my dancing days were over.
But just as I was hanging up my dancing shoes for the last time, a miracle happened. The heavens opened up and delivered me a gift: the wedding dance. To date, I have been in 13 different weddings, and I've probably attended at least 15-20 more on top of that as an adult. I still remember coming home from my aunt and uncle's wedding dance (I was rocking the tux as the ring bearer (at the time I thought it was ring bear, so I was always looking around for that damn bear to show up and carry his weight)) and telling my grandma that my feet hurt so much, but that I had the best time in the world. It took about 15-20 years before that spark was reignited and I realized that the natural habitat of this ring bearer was the wedding dance. My dancing days 2.0 started when I was barely 21 and making my rounds at wedding dances with Chris and Jill. At the time, the dancing took place because I was too drunk to fight my inhibition. At one of my first (probably the first) and most fun wedding dances, I saw Jill's dad, Darrell, lighting the dance floor on fire and the ladies (mostly related to him, but still) flocking to his mad skills. In Darrell I saw my future.
I've carried Darrell's light with me ever since. It doesn't take much to get me on the dance floor anymore. In fact, I'm not embarrassed to admit that I have single handedly gotten the party started on a few occasions. Sure, I've stepped on a few toes in the process (sorry again, Amanda), but I've really started to hit my stride, white guy overbite and all. There is a bar in Walker, MN, that probably wants a pair of my shoes bronzed because every year we go up there for Eel Pout, I don't go home until I've danced with every lady in the place. What amazes me is how many people WANT to dance and don't because of nerves or attitude or whatever. It is easy to spot those people tapping their toes at the table, and it doesn't take much more than a "You wanna dance?" to get them on the floor. I would explain the phenomenon as them probably thinking, "Hey, we can't possibly look more stupid than this guy, but he looks like he's having fun, so what the hell." I had a similar "aha!" moment at a certain wedding dance when I saw a certain friend drop a certain pair of pants and dance with a certain pillar. A packed dance floor is a fun dance floor, just so long as there is enough room for someone to cast an imaginary fishing line across the floor and let me fish dance over to them.
The newest craze is dance video games that expect full motion participation. Jenna and I had bought up as many as we could for the Wii because we both loved dancing together. Let me tell you, this girl knew how to shake it, and she could learn full dance routines in minutes. Still, that didn't stop me from trying to out Kriss-Kross her or try to take her down on Thriller. The great thing about these games is that just like Rock Band and Guitar Hero before them, they seem to draw in everybody. Guys that never in a million years would sing Yellow Submarine while holding a plastic guitar or dance to Wham! are suddenly taking part because it is a game and a competition, and that is evidently enough to make it cool. I'm encouraged for the future of wedding dances as I really believe that these games are going to unlock the inner Astaire in people and I won't have to work so hard to find company on the dance floor.
Unfortunately, I now live in an apartment with people living directly below me, so my dance and activity games and videos are rendered useless in an effort to avoid falling into their living room. My hope would be to someday meet someone who shares my love of booty shaking and maybe take a class or two. None of that fancy-pants ballroom nonsense, but maybe another swing course. My mom has tried so hard over the years to teach me to jitterbug and I even took those aforementioned classes in high school, but nothing ever really stuck. I seem to need my own space and my own freedom to explore my art, but I'd like to give something a little more controlled a shot in hopes that I'll do less damage to those around me. Someday I might even try tap. I've always done this stupid little soft shoe thing, especially on linoleum and desk chair roller pads where it makes a little noise, but even though I'm pretty sure I've almost got it mastered, I know I won't get hired by any companies without some formal training. Ever since I saw Singing In the Rain, I've thought, "Wow, that Gene Kelly is cool. He's totally going to bang Princess Leia's mom!" (For those of you under 65, feel free to Google that joke.) Maybe when I retire I can finally take some time to try to become more like him. Or! Or maybe even better, I'll have a son who I can force to learn to tap, and I'll be one of those stage parents that screams, "Heel, toe, heel, toe, Joey! You're never going to dance in the rain unless you snap those ankles through, dammit!" Then when he's dating a super model and making millions, I can finally live my dream through him, despite his scathing autobiography, "Daddy Dearest". Still, it would probably be worth it.
Until then, I'll work on meeting new single friends that could potentially have wedding dances someday so that I can finally show off my fully memorized Christopher Walken routine seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCDIYvFmgW8
Two steppin' through Tuesday,
Jeff "Twinkle Toes" Pool
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