Social Dance

On Wednesday I went with a friend from high school to Loafer’s Beach Club, a venue in Raleigh. I paid $8 to learn Balboa, a dance, in which one takes very small steps, in closed position. It was too close for me, as I found myself swept into the sweaty bosoms of several homely, husky men. I like Loafer’s because it doesn’t seem as though it should exist – it being a relic of pre-9/11 America, a time during which one could appreciate campy décor and old music in earnest. Several of the women had brought deserts to the club – apple cobbler, chocolate chip cookies, and some kind of cake, and it was a pleasure to eat their free food while watching otherwise ordinary, workaday kind of folks dancing so hard. And they knew all the moves. Would I could have joined them! But, they were so serious about style and form, I felt that to join them there on the dance floor, beneath the mirror-ball, beneath the fishing net so artfully strung from the ceiling, as they did six-count basics, underarm passes, throw-outs and so forth, while I capered about in some perverse interpretation of swing… it would have been insulting and degrading to everyone involved.

Sometimes I think that I would like to learn a real dance, a couples dance, so that I and some like-minded individual could trip the light fantastic together, gracefully, like adults, rather than me, drunk, dancing alone in Hell. But then, male leads make me uncomfortable, because the act of physical direction reinforces male dominance, and dancing, as an established mating ritual approximates the sex act. Allowing a man to direct your actions perpetuates male hegemony! And, I don’t like being told what to do. So, I will continue to dance, frenzied, alone in Hell, until a time when we can communicate psychically, and thus lead together. I mean, Valum Votan says the time is coming, so who knows.

~ by therin on May 5, 2008.