Those Swayze Ways
So my wife and I attended a friend's wedding this past weekend in Killington, Vt. It was a fun wedding reception and the DJ got it going with some cool 80's tunes. One problem though was my struggle to keep from uncorking the dirty dancing moves. You see, most of my dance floor training was gained during college at the local bar. The music was played in the basement and the dance floor was concrete and the walls were cinderblock. Fueled up on $0.75 Red Dogs and the House of Pain Boom-Shlock-Lock-Boomin', you can't help but bump and grind, certainly when there's another 100, sweaty people packed onto this tiny excuse for a dance floor. On a side note, I don't think you can really call what is displayed on today's dance floors "dancing". I mean, the Twist is a dance, the Charleston is a dance, the Swing is a dance. What people do on the dance floor nowadays is just contort around in any odd manner that appears rhythmic and in cadence with the musical beat. Its not very organized, not visually coherent (to the sideline observer), and not something that would earn its own descriptively named dance movement title (unless people agreed to call this spectacle "Drunken Metronomic Muscular Movements and Contortions"). But I digress.

So there I am on the dance floor at this wedding, and the feet and hips and hands and head are carving their own separate arcs over multiple geometric planes. And of course given the music and the beers the instinct is to break out the hip grinding moves, especially the moment Nelly sings his famous weather report. Yeah, it IS getting hot in here. And indeed I do want to take off my clothes. But then you look around and notice that there, sitting at the tables watching the dancers on the floor, are the parents of the bride, and the parents of the groom, and maybe even grandma. And oh yeah, there are little kids around here too. And then you realize you can't be doing the close quarters lambada. So you back off, and re-engage the various orbits that your limbs and extremities had previously occupied. And it goes back to being slightly more wholesome than what you had intended. Which is okay really, because the next string of songs are "Love Shack" by the B-52s; "Come on Eileen" by Dexy's Midnight Runners; and some crap by Bob Seger, and in truth only a sicko dirty dances to Bob Seger....