The Grind

Move This (Shake Your Body) - Technotronic (mp3)
Dancing in the Dark - Tegan and Sara (mp3)

Dancing is of the devil.

Anyone who's ever danced right knows exactly why Baptists are against it. The John Lithgow preacher in Footloose, the shocked adults in Dirty Dancing, the honkeys in Save the Last Dance. Anyone who fears suggestive sexual expression -- be it for the mere symbolic nature, or as a means of communicating future plans -- has every reason in the world to fear dancing.

Christian defenders of dancing will cite David as their reason for being OK with it. He danced and sang naked in the streets in jubilant celebration of his love of God. Yet I find it not the least bit ironic or difficult to predict that the very guy who danced to celebrate God is the same one who poked his gardening gloves in another man's petunias.

To bastardize Lewis Grizzard, there's dancing, and then there's dancin'. The first is when you move your body, and the second is when you move your body and you're up to something. The problem is, most folks who enjoy the former are the very ones who really enjoy the latter.

I'm not saying that a person can't dance without doing other more nefarious deeds. Dancing isn't a bona fide gateway drug. Much of my life is a standing testament to the fact that one can dance the night away in a wide array of environments and situations yet walk off the dance floor with no attachments, no phone numbers, and no hotel keys. God knows my entire college existence was an attempt to prove that dancing had to lead to sex, with female after female proving this to be agonizingly untrue.

The reason I love dancing actually has little (directly) to do with sex, although some similarities inevitably abound.

No other public activity so completely frees the body from its self-consciousness more than dancing. Although I often dance to get attention, or to make a goofy spectacle of myself, putting my body on a dance floor inevitably leads to this joyous and possessed explosion of expression. At its orgiastic peak, it doesn't matter who is watching or what they think of my ability. All that matters is that they know I'm happy and can't help but show it. If you're happy and you know it shake your thang.

It's in those moments that dancing is most like sex. Free your mind, and your ass will follow. In the midst of the "Oh Face," the mind is free. Nobody gives a shit what's happening around them when they've got the "Oh Face," because they're in the middle of a friggin' OH.

At our annual faculty and staff Christmas party, the dance floor opened up for a second straight year -- replacing a more traditional house gathering sans music and booty-shaking -- and I felt compelled to make up for an utterly lackluster appearance in 2008. I even wrote the headmaster's wife a note in advance, which I handed to her upon arrival at the party, in which I thanked her for the party and great food and apologized for having too much to drink. "But dang I had fun!" it concludes. (I didn't have the balls to write "damn" even though she probably wouldn't have cared.)

Nothing about my dancing was aimed at getting me laid or increasing my erotic value to female onlookers. At moments it was about connecting with someone else, a kind of wordless means of telling another man or woman, "Look at us! We get along very well! We both can lip-sync 'Play That Funky Music' while gyrating our hips in a very Caucasian manner!" At other times it was my way of screaming out to the gods, "I don't care what people think, because I love hopping around to 'It Takes Two'!!"

But at the best of times -- and alcohol has plenty of positive responsibility here -- dancing sets me free, and it invites others to join. The sense of liberation, of loosening the restraints of stress and pressure and expectation, becomes almost evangelical.

In ways both fortunate and un-, I am at my most attractive and appealing when I'm being true to myself. Fashion and artifice rarely help me. Lipstick on a pig, as they say. What seems to make for the most appealing version of ME is when I embody the words of Bill Murray in Meatballs: It just doesn't matter!

In my day to day life, I'm shackled and weighed down worrying with what others think of me, frequently trying -- and plenty of times failing -- to impress them or please them or leave them happier or better than I found them. It makes me attentive to people, to their moods, to their words. It makes me a pretty good listener, I think. Ultimately, however, it's selfish, as I seem to base my own worth on how well I impact others. Which means I'm kind of using everyone to fill in some void in myself. Right?

But dancing? At it's best, it's Billy being Billy at the same time it pulls my soul away from the burdensome gravity of everydayness.

Thank God for dancing.