Have you ever seen me dance?
By and large, this is a rhetorical question. Most people have not seen me dance. There’s a reason for that. Here are some exceptions to the general rule that most people have not seen me dance:
- If you ever attended an end of season soccer banquet at the Polish American community center in the 80s, you may have seen me dancing with a tie around my forehead bandana-style.
- If you were at the Canfield Casino in Saratoga Springs New York for the Senior Prom of Colonie Central High School 32 years ago, you would have seen me dancing to the soundtrack of Dirty Dancing, surrounded by girls in humongous ball gowns that were the style that year.
- We were at my wedding?
- Did you by some chance take ballroom dancing class at Rice University in 1998? If so you may have seen me trying to learn to swing-dance with my wife, and I’m sorry.
Of course I dance to one or two songs at most weddings I attended in my 20s and 30s, because those are the rules, but by then I was doing it in begrudgingly, as per the Gen X white guy rulebook.
The only time you might have really seen me let go and dance was in the rec-room of Champlain Hall at Binghamton University. It was with a boy. I am, and have always been, very comfortably heterosexual. This story is not about how I “experimented in college “ or “almost experimented in college“, unless you count “how I experimented with dancing in college”? It is about a man crush, because beautiful is beautiful. The real glory here is I literally can’t remember his name anymore. Hopefully one of the folks from Binghamton will chime in and remember it. It’s whoever was supposed to win the Champlain dorm presidency our freshman year, if Dan Rafeal hadn’t stuffed the ballot box, so our hall mate Adam Rasmussen won. He (not Adam or Dan) was tall and poised and well dressed and cool. I was not (am not). He was intimidating in the way that all people are intimidating when you’re not particularly confident in yourself. I think it was evident to me even then, and obvious now, that he was as uncomfortable in his outward facing character as I was in my own, and most of us were most of our young lives. I didn’t know him well. I did hang out with him one or two nights at dorm parties, but don’t remember anything about him. The solid memory I have is in that rec room.
A bunch of us were dancing to whatever 80s music was playing, and then the beginning beat of Blue Monday by New Order began. I’m sure I knew this song at that point, because I was alive, but I entered college firmly in the REM,10,000 Maniacs, Suzanne Vega camp. I did not know dance music (despite what Michelle Yaroschuck and Patty Edwards tried to teach me in high school study hall). But this guy lit up like he was on fire and started moving with a passion and grace I had never seen before. It was electric. And joyful. He was free. And it made me want to be free.
So this is something I’ve tried to explain more than a few times unsuccessfully. I’ll try again. You know how when I dance, and I’m off the beat, it looks terrible and foolish and like my body is moving wrong compared to everyone in the room? In the middle of the song, he got off the beat. Instead of looking like he was wrong and the record was right, it felt the other way: like he was on the proper beat, and the rest of the room, including the record, had gotten lost. Have you ever realized that when a conductor stands in front of a symphony, they are the person who controls what the dozens of musicians and hundreds or thousands of audience experience, with just the motion of their arms? When I think about that moment, that song, I feel like he was conducting the room and music, leading and making the beat with his body. In the Matrix, each time Neo starts to realize his potential a bit more, they bring up the special effects to show how uncanny it is, and the everyone else in the scene stares and realizes they’re seeing the impossible. That’s what it was like. It was probably just me, but it was sublime. I wanted to be free like him. I danced to that song with all the passion and skill a 4th grade band throws at the Star Wars theme.
But I danced.