Wanted: Dance Chaperones

And We Danced - Hooters (mp3)
Get Low - Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz (mp3)

Wanted: High School Dance Chaperones

Must be on staff of school. Must be willing to stand and watch teenagers dance for extended periods of time, including girls age 15-18 in ridiculously tight-fitting dresses, but finding the scene neither arousing nor disgusting, but rather merely just what teenagers do these days. Especially teenagers with overly-permissive parents who apparently don’t mind their daughters looking like expensive escorts from Thailand or some poor section of what used to be Russia.

Must be willing to say the following to teenagers jacked up on hormones:

• “Please stop grinding” up to 20 times, knowing full well they will go back to grinding as soon as you are more than five feet removed from their presence
• “Please consider returning your skimpy dress down to its intended location, thus covering your backside and preventing your thong from being seen by others”
• “No I was not looking at your girlfriend’s bare ass”
• “OK yes, I was looking at her ass, but only because it’s my job. And because you were showing it to me and everyone else and even using your hands to point to where I should apparently be looking. And I’m asking you to remedy the situation so that I may no longer have the free show”
• “No I do not enjoy this job. I needed the Christmas money because I’m a teacher, you little prick”
• “Yes, when you’re in college, you can fellate yourself in the main quad for all I care, and you can have group orgies disguised as a dance in your frat basement, but this dance is organized and sponsored by an educational not-for-profit institution, and we are in some small way responsible for your behavior while at this event”
• “No, we’re not violating your fucking privacy. You have no privacy on a dance floor”
• “No, the $30 you paid for you and your date does not purchse you the right to do whatever you like while you’re here”
• “Yes, it is our business. Now please cover up your girlfriend’s breasts so that I can go back to looking you in the eye when we’re talking”
• “And say no to drugs”

If you are capable of saying these things to sometimes large teenage males and their dates -- young innocent flowers who certainly have no responsibility whatsoever in these acts because they almost never say anything in protest or anger but merely shrug and return to their grinding activities -- please apply as soon as possible. We’re running short on adults willing to do this job.

Sincerely,
the School Administration

Yes, this was inspired by my weekend. I again chaperoned one of our dances. And all reasonable minds seem to agree that, as high school dances nationwide go, ours is relatively tame. (Then again, so was the tiger that mauled Sigfried's pal Roy.)

At the end of the dance, we all decided the grinding at this year’s event was less disturbing and less all-encompassing than it had been at last year’s event. However, considering a ban was enacted on grinding at dances, and considering that decision was made by and demanded by people who were nowhere to be found chaperoning this event, I found myself getting angrier the farther I get from the experience.

One of the boys, an absolutely great kid who danced in completely appropriate ways the entire evening -- hell, he even actually talked to and looked his date in the eyes -- told me, “I really don’t see how anything we do out here is your business. I know you’re all claiming to look out for us, but I think it’s pretty clear we can take care of ourselves, and all you’re doing is proving to these guys that you’re out of touch.”

His honesty was painful, refreshing, and downright infuriating the farther I get from it. His generation is more sexually responsible and no more slutty than any recent previous generation, from what I've read on the subject. So maybe he has a point. But he's also rubbing my face in it. Literally. And I'm not getting paid enough to have his point rubbed in my face, not by a longshot.

No matter. His point won't scare me away. I’ll be attending every single dance I can when my daughters hit high school. They’ll get their friggin’ dance floor privacy when they move far far away to college.

Dance World

Winter Gloves--"Dancing My Heart Out" (mp3)

Almost by accident, I have become something of an aficionado of modern dance. For the past 8 years of one or both of my children have been involved in modern dance programs, with somewhere between 2 and 4 performance viewed during each of those years. So I've seen the shows, put my time in, and, most of all, really come to enjoy them. That isn't something I ever expected to happen.

And, since the start, I've had to know something about modern dance because I had been expected to know something. After each performance, my older daughter demands that we retire to an eatery (usually the Friendly's in Mt. Vernon, Ohio) to break down the performance. I get the club sandwich and the rasberry tea.

But I had to be able to critique, so I trained myself. First, I figured out that some of the pieces were just silly, like the girl birthing herself as a chick from a shell, and that it was okay to realize that. Like modern poetry, modern dance can allow for the self-important to get carried away. I also discovered, because of my ballet training, that I had a pretty decent sense of what good dancing was and what wasn't (and by 'ballet training' I mean my years as a ballet dad before the modern dance years). The modern pieces use the precision of ballet, at times, but incorporate direct acting and a world dance catalog that leads to a lot of cross-cultural pollination. Finally, I guess like a viewer of modern art, I tried to develop an appreciation of technique over substance. I didn't have to understand the dance to appreciate it (though I didn't every fully accept that premise).

To be a casual aficionado, you don't need to ramble on and on. I guess you could, to establish your aficionadacity, but you don't have to. All you need are a couple of talking points. And, after a number of concerts, you have benchmarks and bases for comparisons anyway. Last weekend, after my daughter's last Kenyon dance, I had these two things to tell her: 1. "That was the most gymnastic dancing I've ever seen you do (a compliment!)" and 2. "I've noticed something about choreography--if dancers don't have anything to do, they shouldn't be on the stage; otherwise, they kill the energy." I remain pretty confident in those opinions.

Here's the fascinating part of the experience, at least for me. Humans love narrative, especially English teaching humans. Modern dance tends to eschew narrative. If it tells a story, the story will not be the point. If there is something linear about it, it will veer wildly from that pattern. Nor will it even help you much with what it's about, not even with the title of dance itself. The last two pieces my daughter danced in were titled "Enotrope" and "Monarchs of a Permeable Kingdom." Those sound more like songs from Yes albums in the '70's than titles that would help to focus an audience on what they're about to see.

And so, when I watch a dance, I create the narrative in my head, or, if not a fully-fleshed out story, at least some reasons for why the dancers do what they are doing. I may not understand the title of the dance or the purpose of the music, but I do look for some resolution in the behavior of the characters.

Over time, though, I've reached an unusual place. I've started to think of modern dance as a world, a world that transcends any individual piece, a world that runs parallel to our own, but with a different set of rules. I call it "Danceworld."

In Danceworld, human speech is almost unnecessary. Certainly, it is not needed to negotiate interactions with others. Sure, there are random utterances, chants, overlapping recitations, and even, at times, statements of purpose shouted to the heavens (or to the blackness above the stage), but mostly mouths are about exhalation, about exertion, about breathing to stand still, to maintain yourself, after some colossal endeavor. My daughter was in one highly-regarded piece that used a lot of language to critique societal expectations of women, but that is the exception.

To catch others attention, you merely meet their eye, touch their shoulder, hoist them, roll with them, climb through them, over them, mimic them, join in kinesethic agreement with them. Their interest, more than likely, will be transitory, as soon they must move to their own spots, their own places or towards others who will do different things with them. But conversation, as such, will transmit almost exclusively through bodily languages. They will travel with you part of the way. You may end up together, but there is no sense that you will stay that way.

Isolation and monogamy are both ultimately tragic, as bodies must touch to talk, and energy travels from person to person like God's imminent contact with Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Isolation, rather than being pitiful, seems self-indulgent, the stage being too large for just one person for very long. To dance with just one partner, well, that happens back in Balletworld. Here, in what is often a dark, difficult world, there is a definite strength in numbers, an implied misery loves company, a need to reach many bodies. And bodies leave the stage quickly and often return randomly, leaving dancers to sort out the awkward reconnections after their foreseeable indiscretions.

Danceworld is about falling, getting up, falling, getting up, falling perhaps from being pushed, getting up perhaps with the help of someone else, or slipping or being overwhelmed by circumstance. It is a world where human contact is like a car crash, a battering ram, a sleepover pillowfight, a game of dominoes. It is a cosmic game of chase and catch, catch and release. Bodies fly around like electrons, each following a charted course, but destined to collide, or at least to navigate around each other.

Most of all, Danceworld is about desolation, or at least sparseness. It is life stripped bare in ways that we are, perhaps, unwilling to confront, unless forced to. Though the dancers wear costumes of one sort or another, the costumes move through the context they imply, getting instead only the barest of sets. And even then, rather than the costumes suggesting characters, they tend to show us various kinds of partial selves. We see creatures and travelers, but we are never quite sure of the reasons for the baseness or the destination.

To observe this world, to lean into it from the close rows, is to remind ourselves that there are violences that we cannot prevent, attractions that we cannot deter, mysteries that have no solution. For modern dance never, ever answers a question, and often obscures even what the question might be. Against that unfathomable backdrop, we sit and watch the endeavors of others, hoping that they, and we, have rehearsed enough to be able to make some kind of way with grace.

Leaves You With Nuthin' Mister

"Where Do You Think You're Going?" - Christmas Vacation (mp3)
Mele Kalikimaka - Bing Crosby & the Andrews Sisters (mp3)

Here is the honest first-person account of one man’s attempt to do something amusing, fun, and mildly noble. And also just damned foolish.

Times like this ain’t easy for nobody. Not for people, not for businesses, and not for non-profits, which depend heavily on people and businesses doing well. In tough times, water cooler talk mutates. It used to be highlights from last week’s Saturday Night Live skits or Sunday’s best NFL games. More often lately, the talk is like those anvils in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, sort of darkly cartoonish, but heavy, burdensome.

Backseat driving other people’s jobs. Lamenting that too many people have grown too mentally slovenly, having dined too bountily on the fatted calf of the Good Times. Decrying all the ways we have lost our way as an institution. Twenty years of no job cuts and only the occasional year without any raises is pretty good stuff. Too good, really. It takes you off the edge, which is where Maverick swears one must be to survive.

Early in the year, the noble fisherman best known as “TroutKing” joked that it would be cool if we DJ’d the annual faculty Christmas party. He got the idea while driving from one fishing hole to another that summer while shuffling through his iPod.

Who knows why for sure? (Well, troutking does... but it doesn’t serve my narrative or deadline to ask him.) Further, who knows why he asked me to join his folly? Was it like Bill Murray dragging Harold Ramis into the Army in “Stripes”? Was it because I have some vague knowledge and appreciation for rap that evades him? The world may never know.

Regardless, I made note of the idea and in October mentioned it to the boss. He was foolish enough to accept.

Trout and I spent a decent amount of time trying to get things right, trying to satisfy the event’s theme -- “Caribbean Christmas” -- while also minimizing our own nausea (read: not too much Jimmy Buffet). Trying to structure 3 hours of dance-friendly music for a crowd with a 50-year age range and a strong majority of employees born prior to 1970 is a hopelessly-doomed task.

"Electric Slide"? No. "Cotton-Eyed Joe"? Noooo no no. "Cha-Cha Slide"? Aww helllll no. Love Train? They’re gonna demand it, I say. Over my deaf body, Trout says. It’s inevitable, like death, I say. Then kill me now!! Trout says.

Meanwhile, we’re both being bombarded with requests and suggestions from friends and enemies alike. For every one “you should play...” we receive 10 “please don’t play...” And then, early last week as we sit in Trout’s office sharing our concerns, fears and excitement, our boss walks in. He wants to make sure “Love Train” will make the list and that Trout won’t go off the rails playing too much Bob and Bruce.

It’s his party. He can train if he wants to.

The event itself went off as well as could have been expected. A tough grader like myself would give us a B. Dollar for dollar, getting a B-quality DJ experience was a damn good investment, so there’s no shame in our performance.

Yet, much like my experiences teaching classes almost a decade ago, I couldn’t help but feel this heavy weight of disappointment in all of it. Feeling like we did something “pretty well” and “OK” doesn’t make me proud. My expectations of myself are too high, perhaps too unrealistic. When we turned off those speakers after the party was over, the look of joy on my face was 3/4 a look of relief that it was over and done with.

When it became clear that our boss was regretting (or at least fearing) his decision to grant us DJ privileges, when everyone was spouting off divergent notions of great songs, when the “Love Train” drama came to a head, all these things piled into the clown car of melodrama and tension far surpassing anything that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with “Play That Funky Music” or “Mony Mony.”

We just wanted to have some fun, play some music, and get people to dance. That’s all.

During the party, the micromanagement continued. It wasn’t so much his wanting to stick his nose in that hurt, because as I said, it’s his party. Rather, it was the look of abject discomfort in his eyes, his lack of confidence in us. He wasn’t the conductor of the “Love Train”; he was the conductor of that runaway train in “Unstoppable.”

Our hopes of doing something nice and mostly harmless, that would save the school a few bucks (between $600-1,000, actually), was making the experience much less enjoyable for the boss. Not the goal I had in mind, not by a long shot.

There was a silver lining, however.

Many of our friends and colleagues wanted us to succeed. They wanted it almost as much as we did, maybe more for a few of them. Friends who just don’t dance, hardly ever, and rarely for more than a song, were out on that dance floor for almost the entire time. They dragged their spouses out there with them. They all cut rugs much longer and plusher than is their nature. They did this not for the music, and not for the party, but for us, the two nerds behind the mixing board, panicking over whether “Superstition” or “TikTok” would better serve the immediate needs of the dancing masses. (Important Side Note: “Funkytown” no longer holds sway over anyone, especially the syntho-’80s version.)

We the DJs were out on a limb. Our friends went out on a limbo. For us.

Then we had our own Norma Rae moment. The boss was calling it a night, but Trout wanted to play “Glory Days.” It was the one Bruce song he had insisted on including. The boss demurred. Strongly. Trout was stout. In bold defiance, he picked up the mike with a call of duty to his colleagues. Sing with him! Dance with him! Show Bruce the love and respect the REAL Boss deserved!!

And, by God, they did. One of our coworkers -- a guy who could hardly be considered a close friend -- even organized a “Soul Train line” and got people dancing down the middle. It was the damn coolest Last Song dance moment a dying dwindling crowd could have had.

With friends and coworkers like those, one hardly need ask why I’m still at the same place after 14 years. It was one of the best and most uplifting Christmas presents I’ve ever received.

Scenes from a High School Dance, Part III

Butterfly Thing - Tanya Donelly (mp3)

SCENE ONE
SCENE TWO

Scene Three: An Ante-Chamber
Three hours into the dance

I exit the ballroom area and walk into a side area. During adult parties, this is where they set up the bars and where people escape the music to chat. At this point in the evening, it has become the resting place of the rejected and dejected. The sad sophomore boys who came solo in the vain hopes of catching romantic lightning in a bottle now realize how stacked against them the odds were. They have found solace in the comfort of shared misery. Their faces aren’t some doomed cloud of depressed angst, but rather the look you often see on a 1-15 basketball team. They aren’t in despair so much as resigned to their fates.

I walk up to them and ask how it’s been. They shrug and smile and say Fine and Good. What’s the point in giving me, the clueless adult, more information than that? “No luck, huh?” I say. They shrug and shake their heads and keep drinking their glasses of water. In my mind I travel back 20 years and think, This is where I’d be sitting, having a conversation about Rush or ping-pong or the X-Men...

Sitting on a window ledge, the window open and looking out to the expansive town of Chattanooga below, is a young girl, probably a sophomore. Her dark purple dress keeps catching a little of the cold breeze, and she’s mouthing the words to the only slow song Paramore has ever recorded (that I know of), the one song all night the DJ played for a “slow dance.” It’s called “The Only Exception.” Can’t say I saw that one coming as The Slow Song of the Night.

Looking perhaps a little too long, I realize she’s crying. The storyline possibilities flood my head. Did she get dumped? Did she come alone? Is she wondering just how far she would fall if she just leaned a little further out the window? Can I get a what what?

Calmly I walk over, not wanting to scare or annoy her and hating to break into her private melodrama but feeling somehow obligated. “Hey sweetheart... everything OK?” I say. (Yeah, I know it was sexist, and I wish I could have found a better way to refer to her, but I wasn’t saying it like Dabney friggin’ Coleman. I was saying it like someone who has daughters and who could see his own daughter, years down the line, sitting in that damn windowsill and mouthing words out into the cold air in the hopes that some Romeo was down below, within earshot, and capable of reading the heart and feelings of a lost girl, capable of swooping into that miserable dance, taking her hand, leading her to the dance floor, and watching as the mass parted in awe of his charm and beauty, as they danced some immortal Beauty & the Beast waltz so stunning the crowd was reduced to tears.)

She dries up so quickly you could almost be convinced she was never actually crying. “Oh yeah, yeah,” she says, nodding insistently. “I just love this song soooo much.”

“Really?” I ask. I want to reach out and put a hand on her shoulder, but... well, there’s about 20 legal reasons why I don’t.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Thanks!” She says it with an exclamation point attached. As in, please leave, thanks! As I nod, conceding the fight, and back away, she looks back out the window into the darkness. She will wait until I’m farther away before mouthing more lyrics.

Meanwhile, I’m reminded that girls -- all teenagers, for that matter -- don’t need a break-up or a specific moment of rejection to want to sit on a windowsill, stare into the wide open pitch, see their breath cloud up and move out, and feel miserable. Every day in a teenager’s life offers dozens of moments where intense and extreme joy or sorrow or fear can grip every fiber in their being.

And there we are, semi-helpless witnesses to their dramas, offering a feeble and uncertain hand or ear, but mostly just hoping the power of our sideline sympathizing keeps them afloat for another day, another month, another year, until things get better. We hope.


SCENE ONE
SCENE TWO

Scenes from a High School Dance, Part II

Let's Dance to Joy Division - The Wombats (mp3)

SCENE ONE


Scene Two: The Lobby
Two hours into the dance

Outside in the lobby where half of the adults are gathered, a young English teacher and I joke about the dancing. I tell him I envision a packed emergency room where dozens of boys have entered to deal with “third-degree friction burns to their crotchal reagions.” He mocks my use of the invented word “crotchal” and says they probably use number codes for it. We’ve got another 352 out there! Those kids... they just won’t stop grinding... they won’t stop until someone dies from crotchal burns!

A teacher from the other school, a woman my age who graduated my same year, walks over to us looking flabbergasted. “We just walked through the middle of the dance crowd. It’s. Awful. Awe. Full. There was a boy with his hand all over his date’s breast and another girl with her dress hiked up so high I could see her panties.”

We all look at each other and sigh and shrug and all but communicate an acceptance of how powerless and clueless we are to the teenage world. Mostly I’m thinking I’m glad I didn’t have to see the girl’s panties, because then I’m forced to either ignore it or be the pervert who noticed it. Lose lose situation.


I’m lost in my reverie when she calls my name. “You need to tell your headmaster to talk to your students about this.” I raise an eyebrow. Was she serious?

“Seriously, there’s no excuse for them behaving like that out there. He should talk to them.”

I try to picture that. Our headmaster, on the verge of 60 with shock-white hair and his calming voice, trying to tell a collective group of 600 adolescent boys how they should dance. He could close with the Scary Anecdote, a version of one of those anti-smoking or anti-meth commercials that hope to discourage through fear.

“Boys, let me tell you a story. Two years ago, after a dance just like this one, I was in the ER all night, sitting at the bedside of a boy. We’ll call him Timmy. Timmy was dying. He was dying because he spent the entire night in cotton underwear and dress pants, grinding his privates into the backside of his date.

Unbeknownst to Timmy as he enjoyed the feel of his manhood nestled between his date’s welcoming cheeks, the constant and never-ceasing friction was removing one layer of skin cells after another. You might not know this, but the penis has far fewer skin layers than the rest of the body. That’s why it’s so sensitive. And poor Timmy, so excited to be dry-humping a girl to the sounds of Usher, chose to ignore those slight hints of pain his body kept sending to his brain.

Five hours later, I’m by his side in the ER, and he’s on fluids and on the verge of death, and what for? For 90 minutes of poorly-simulated sex friction. Yes, Timmy lived, but barely. And he’s been afraid to dance ever since. Don’t be like Timmy. Take care of yourselves. Look your date in the eye once in a while. Dance with her straddling one of your legs to the sounds of ‘Low’ by Flo Rida, letting both of your bodies sink towards the floor while she grinds her personal parts into your right thigh.

Or, better yet, dance in large circles of six or seven of your peers to songs by REM or the Violent Femmes. The ladies totally dig that.”

And I can see this teacher, a woman who has clearly forgotten her own behavior patterns some 20 years earlier, hearing this speech and smiling and nodding and saying to everyone, “Finally. Someone’s teaching these stupid kids a lesson.”

SCENE THREE

Scenes from a High School Dance, Part I

Kiss Kiss - Chris Brown (mp3)

Scene One: The Dance Floor
One hour into the school’s semiformal.

A third of the expansive ballroom is packed with the dancing cyst, a cancerous and growing cluster of teenage cells, crammed tightly into a roundish mass. The steady bass thump of a dozen different songs gently nudges the winterized windows. The collective occasionally shouts out a memorable chorus. The girls out-shout the boys.

Faculty supervisors prowl the perimeter like hyenas. Instead of seeking the wounded and vulnerable, they slink around to find those pre-adult lifeforms who might be having what can only be described as “too much fun.” Anyone making out? Any hands getting personal with another person’s private regions in a too-public manner? When a teacher sniffs out such a moment, they enter the fray and pounce, demanding that the couple in question lower their degree of enjoyment to get more in line with the rest of the group.

It feels like we are the bad guys. Maybe we are.

One teacher says she looks for the boys whose shirts are untucked. Rumor has it that boys untuck their shirts and unzip their fly, thus allowing their date to reach behind and offer a “tug job” during a dance. Really? I ask. “Oh you have no idea. Girls talk.” I hope she’s wrong. About the shirts, not the girls talking.

One teacher in his early 30s stands in one spot almost the entire night, near an open window a mere 10-15 feet from the dancing cancer. He just can’t get over the monotany of it. “Look out there. All of them are dancing exactly the same. All of them.”

I observe. He’s exaggerating, but not much. Boy after boy stands behind his date, pushed into her, his hands on her hips or on her waist, their combined form attempting to rock left and right in some close proximity to the rhythm and to the movements of their partner. Entire songs, entire stretches of songs, go by, and these couples remain in the exact. same. positions. They don’t seem to talk much. They don’t even have to deal with eye contact or facial expression, because they’re not even looking at one another. Probably 8 out of every 10 couples dance like this.

One particularly sad case catches our eye. A boy already 4-5” shorter than his date is further insulted by her wearing 3” heels. In a desperate attempt to match the grinding power of his more evenly-heighted peers, he is up-thrusting his hips with every beat. He looks like a Chihuahua attempting to mate with a German Shepherd. And, appropos of the metaphor, the poor German Shepherd mostly ignores him and rolls her eyes, wondering when some bigger dog might rip out this annoying mutt’s throat.

At one point, the teacher and I notice that six different couples are lined up, unintentionally, doing exactly the same thing in the same rhythm. “They look like a family of penguins,” I say.

Scene Two

A Glitch in the Step Matrix

Bit by Bit (from Fletch) - Stephanie Mills (mp3)
Work Itself Out - Roadside Graves (mp3)

Progress, it must be remembered, is best as a dance, not a march.

Often the only way forward also requires steps to the side, and steps back. Marching is against human nature. It's forced, not organic. When progress is forced, it creates friction, tension, unease. Dancing, on the other hand, requires an understanding of what the body's natural inclinations are, combined with tons of practice and work. But dancing, when done right, is not forced. It is free of tension. It looks completely fluid and simple. Thus the lovely saying, "Free your mind, and your ass will follow."

So let's apply this notion to the progression of race relations in America. Specifically, what happens to this progress when a white sorority gets all uppity and wins a national step competition?

That's exactly the question forced upon us this February in Atlanta, when the Zeta Tau Alpha chapter of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville won the Sprite Step Off.

Most of BOTG's readers, I suspect, know little if any about Stepping. Personally, I'm only just knowledgeable and educated enough to get myself in trouble. When I was a freshman, my dorm RA was the president-elect of UNC's Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, and because he was easily the most influential African-American presence in my young and clueless life to that point, I was given several mini-lectures on the history and significance of stepping. I also witnessed two official step shows and at least a dozen impromptu step performances in the Pit outside the school's main dining hall.

Something about the live performance, about witnessing a step show happen right there in front of you, multiplies the power of the experience. In this, it's very much like hockey, which in my opinion is the sport whose awesomeness is the most powerfully affected by watching it live. (Football, soccer and basketball, on the other hand, translate far too well to TV, which is why they are the world's most popular sports.)

Anyway, a bunch of white chicks from Arkansas won a national competition intended for, if not explicitly exclusive to, historically-black sororities. When they were announced as winners to the predominantly-black Atlanta audience, the crowd reacted by gathering in a circle, holding up empty soda bottles, and announcing that they'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

Ha. Of course that wasn't the reaction.

Here was the reaction, according to the Washington Post.

Here was the reaction, according to The Root.com.

If you read the YouTube comments -- thousands of them -- in response to the various videos of their performance (a 2-minute excerpt is embedded at the bottom of this post), you will see a display of all levels of IQ, knowledge, and tolerance warring and wrestling with what all of this means.

Here's my reaction to the reaction.

First, the immediate and negative response of the crowd was something any idiot should have seen coming. History is full of competitions where a square peg attempts to fit in a traditionally round hole, emerges victorious, and is consequently despised by large parts of the traditional public. Jackie Robinson. Althea Gibson. Calvin Peete. Lamar Latrell. Daniel Laruso. Herbie The Love Bug. But I digress.

We look back on these moments and admire the people (or cars) involved. People my age tend to undervalue and underappreciate the struggles and scorn the great groundbreaking athletes endured. There's no way I, at 38 and white, can truly appreciate appreciate that, when Hank Aaron rounded the bases after breaking Maris' home run record, it lingered in the back of his mind that someone might well try to kill him.

It is entirely irrational to look to a bunch of binge-drinking white college chicks from Arkansas to be game-changers in the world of racial progress. But, if you look at the dance of progress in history, we must at least acknowledge that what happened that February night in Atlanta will be considered a vital and important "step" in this never-ending move towards something better. (Sorry for the pun. Couldn't help it.)

Now if we can just get Darius Rucker to win the seed spitting contest at the Redneck Olympics, our dance of racial progress will surely be complete.

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.