There is a real, old time dance hall in town complete with a hardwood floor and wood plaques on the walls from the local square dance groups. I don't know when the place was built but it must have been in the 40's if not earlier. It looks as if the walls are batt and board with shingle siding and it looks like more rooms were added on over time. No matter how it came to be, it feels like a place with hoop skirts and a caller and fiddlers and it's been that way forever.
But now on Friday nights there are DJ dance jams in this hall. This just doesn't make sense to me, not that I've ever square danced, but just the idea of DJ dancing sounds like it can't be anything like stepping and swinging but more like smashing and pounding. Just what is DJ dance and why would anyone want to do it? Can't I just stay home and put a couple of records on and get the same thing?
Okay, I'm not that old but I'll admit that I still own a turntable that's stored away somewhere. The last time I used it was to transcribe South Pacific onto a CD. Enzio Pinza was singing and it's hard to find that record re-released on CD. I'm not going to keep listening to records. That's just silly old-timey sentimentality. So I could just put a couple of CDs on and dance in my living room.
Who needs the DJ? But then again, I'm not too old to learn new tricks so I got up my courage to check the place out last Friday. It isn't that I don't know how to shuffle around on the dance floor but isn't DJ music the same thing as the music kids play in what I call thump-thump cars? You know, those flashy looking Hondas with the blue lights in the wheel wells and humongous speakers in the trunk that works like an Osterizer on your brain when one of them pulls up next to you at a stop light. I wouldn't want to be in that car or for that matter, in any room with that noise.
"I hope you'll like the selections tonight," the DJ says after a few cuts of curious but not dancable bliss-out flute and conga. I guess this is the warm-up for the heavy brain damage to come. The DJ is a woman in her 40's just like most of the other people in the place. "Some of it is going to be, well, kind of hard for some people and I'm sorry about that, but other selections I've made are more mellow."
What did I get myself into here? Hard to take music? Does that mean that head banging, loud, go nowhere bump-bump noise at the stop light? Do I have to put up with that? Or do I even know what the DJ is talking about? What I did notice is that the DJ is a she and she isn't young enough to be my grand daughter like the girl I imagine in the passenger seat of that thumping Honda.
None of this makes any sense and I'm quick to jump to the conclusion that I won't like it. I won't like the "hard to take" selections and the "more mellow" cuts will sound like funeral dirges. Why did I pay ten dollars to dance to something I'll hate? Or, more to the point, why do I hate everything? Why do I assume that everything that is new to me is going to be horrible? This is just contrary to the way I think I'm living my life but I have no intention of admitting that. I'd rather hold onto the past than forge ahead.
When she put on the real music, (I don't know how DJs put on music. It's probably all coming off one USB memory chip) I was hit in the face with a combination of rap and reggae. Now I know what to do with the reggae because that was popular after disco got stale, but the rap? That's back to the loud Honda and people that are too young to even have a driver's license, right?
Wrong. I'm not going to let this get the best of me.
On the way to the gym this afternoon, I saw a kid on the corner in front of the surf shop and he was doing some kind of dance with his shoulders and arms and hands and wearing an iPod. As I waited for the traffic I thought about all that pumping iron I do at the gym trying to be macho. Could I actually put that gym torture to good use doing the act with the shoulders and arms?
I tried putting the arms and shoulders movement on the rap rhythm. Isn't that what rap dance is all about? There's even a new hand sign, (new to me, anyway) called 'low five'. It's a kind of a greeting that is the opposite of 'high five'. It probably takes a forward movement of the chest and shoulder while keeping the upper arm and forearm stiff and the palm facing back, not forward. The 'bros from the 'hood do that I imagine, but a search of urbandictionary.com didn't clear it up for me. But who cares about the etymology? The shoulder and arm moves pops along with the back beat and takes much less energy than trying to keep my thighs going that fast. Conserving body energy is something that old people all know about.
Then I added the reggae part to my hips and thighs which is a swaying two-step with the downbeat missing. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but it was fun. Really fun. I just tranced out with the loud, steady back beat penetrating my brain like meditation drumming and the syncopated rap going through my chest and shoulders like a charmer's snake with bad back spasms. I just closed my eyes and didn't care what was going on around me. There was no red light I was waiting for and no old "I've never done this so it must be bad" ideas running through my throbbing head.
At least nothing was going to stop me until I felt a woman's arm around my shoulders that made my eyes pop open like pinball bumpers.
"Hi. I'm Carrie. It looks like you're having fun with the music." It was the DJ. "I guess you're new here. This is the mellow part I was talking about," she said but I was stepping to what I thought was the hard to take music. "You might want to save your energy for later," Carrie said. I might have wanted to do that but it was too late to change my dance card now. I was having a blast and went right on until the party was over. This could be my new addiction but really, I'm still too old for this.
Hmm. I wonder how much those Hondas with the speakers and the blue lights in the wheel wells cost. Somehow I don't think I could just add those touches to my pre-century VW hippie camper.
But then maybe I could be getting too old for that last century, out-of-it, hippie stuff too.
