dancing

Saturday Morning Thoughts About Friday Nights

Posted on by akiwifreund

Last night was a babysitting night for my nephews, ages 11 and 7, while my sister and her husband attended an art opening for a friend. I got permission to initiate them into the world of the musical “Grease” and all of its dirty references with actors who were very obviously not teenagers – the boys immediately picked up that Stockard Channing was “old” (33 when the movie was filmed). The 7-year-old said the actors were “creepy.” But they still got up and excitedly danced along with “Greased Lightning.”

I told my sister that if any questions came up about dirty jokes, she was getting all the queries. I didn’t want to get in trouble for giving them any answers.

Back in 1997 to 2003 I was living in Cincinnati, and during that time I worked in a very large law firm that expanded from 50 people to 350 people by the time I left. If you’ve never worked with lawyers, just know that they can drink. It was a great place for me to be really social. I did a lot of dancing. Sometimes I can’t believe that my Friday nights now are so different from 20 years ago. TWENTY YEARS.

We used to bring our going-out clothes to work on Fridays (if we weren’t already wearing them), and then all pile into the bathroom with our curling irons and hair spray and perfume and body glitter and high heels and makeup. We were a core group of four but sometimes there were more, and we’d rent a hotel room to stay in so we wouldn’t drive home drunk. If there were 8-10 of us, the hotel room would only end up being $10-15 downtown for a decent room, and maybe even a suite with a living room and pull-out couch.

One of the nights that we had a larger group for a friend’s birthday, there were 10 of us total, and four people got two bedrooms, and the rest of us were out in the living room. Two of the girls were doing full body barrel rolls over one of the guys on the floor. Now, let me tell you that I have no idea how we got this guy to party with us, but we did. He was younger and he worked in the mail room next to our area and we built up a good rapport with him, and he was fucking hot. There’s just no other way to say it. He was hot and he had a big, tight body with muscles everywhere, and we all wanted to jump him. So at the end of the night my two friends were rolling around on the floor with him, and I was sure that at some point it was going to be a threesome and I was going to have to pretend to look away. Unfortunately for them, it didn’t happen. A few days later one of them whisper screamed to me that he had the biggest penis she had ever had the pleasure of bumping into and she might have been a little scared if she would have been sober. I was a little sad that no one deflowered the mail room guy. It was some sort of male dance review fantasy.

Every time we went out I managed to play kissy face with some random stranger. I’ve been accused of putting out a scent, but maybe it’s because I just shake my ass when I’m dancing. One time on the dance floor I was minding my own business when a guy who was exactly my height started dancing with me and immediately put his hands on my shoulders and started pressing down really hard. Maybe I was bouncing around too much? He was really drunk and it’s possible he wanted the world to stop spinning. My friends were watching this happen. They said they could see the instant that my face changed from “I’m going to see where this goes” to “Oh, HELL no!” After he succeeded in immobilizing me, he tried to suck my face off with his lips. I couldn’t move my body away from him, only my neck. Back, back, back went my head like a chicken, and his lips kept stretching forward like a cartoon. I finally pried his hands off and climbed over my friends to get to the corner of the booth and he eventually went away after he couldn’t figure out how to find me again.

A bunch of the bars in the Over the Rhine area of downtown Cincinnati change ownership and themes often, but back in the late ’90’s the popular ones were Banana Joe’s (a chain that some of you might remember in other cities) and a ’70’s disco place called “Have a Nice Day Cafe” and one of those light-up disco dance floors. I remember that some dumbass maced someone else on the dance floor and the whole bar had to be evacuated one night, and all of us were teary-eyed and gagging. It was not “nice.”

Banana Joe’s had $1 rail drinks from 5 pm to 9 pm, so we would race from the firm to get there as soon as possible and pound down those drinks before they became full price, and to dance before the floor got packed. I was often the first one on the floor. I can still hear my friend saying, “There go her hips!”

One night in particular we had a bigger group of about 7 meeting up for drinking and dancing, starting early as usual. It included a gay couple and it was on a chilly night; we were all partying on the cheap and there wasn’t a coat check, so we just piled our coats in the corner by the DJ booth and danced near it, per the usual. On that night, though, there was a guy who was coming up to all of the girls and humping all of us in a distasteful way and wouldn’t take no for an answer, so we were throwing him dirty looks and edging away from him – and further away from our coats.

Dumb move. Not much time lapsed when one of the guys noticed that the nice $700 leather coats he and his boyfriend owned had been stolen by the obnoxious guy. We looked at the front door and the guy was on his way out. We girls were pissed! We shot out the door and yelled at the doorman to ask which way the asshole went, then we split up – two one way, two another. We circled the building, running to catch up, and by the time I did with the person I had paired up with, the other two girls had already pounced on the loser and retrieved the two jackets. They had seen him slinging them into a dumpster when he was taking off down an alley. They were yelling at him and he was holding up his hands as if he didn’t know what they were screaming about, then he slinked off into the shadows. We celebrated a little the fact that we kicked ass while the boys waited inside to see if they would ever get their jackets back.

I think about my Friday nights now, when I have a few hours with my nephews, or when I am looking for some diversion on Netflix or Hulu or Amazon. I’m so glad that I embraced every opportunity to be social, that I chased after an asshole who stole my friends’ coats and nothing bad really came of it, and that all of us survived the Friday nights.

I realized, just this moment, that every generation thinks that they are the ones that discovered wild. That’s not true at all. My nephews are going to figure that out too. They have no idea what their parents did or what I did because they think of us as the adults that are pretty quiet on Friday nights.

Dancing With The Stars 1980

Posted on by akiwifreund

On OKCupid, I got a guy with a screen name similar to the title of this blog hitting me up, talking at me with his job resume, telling me he makes “pretty good money.” That’s his icebreaker. He waited about 8 hours to tell me that we needed to meet up. That’s after I didn’t respond to his initial messages, and I haven’t been on the site at all.

Out of curiosity, I logged on to see what in the world made him so sure he should make this demand of me without even talking to me first. His profile says we’re a 43% match and he’s really good at “giving messages.” Besides that, it’s the usual “ask me and I’ll tell you” laziness in the rest of the profile.

I think I’m going to let this guy keep cha-cha-cha-ing on into the sunset by himself.

Modern Love: It’s Not Only Me

Posted on by akiwifreund

In early 2008, shortly after I had knee surgery, I let a new friend talk me into hitting the bars in Tempe to go dancing. It was laparoscopic surgery so it was pretty non-invasive, but I had all kinds of problems. They had already taken 2 litres of fluid off of it over the course of 3 visits, and then when I had too much fluid taken away, I had to have non-chicken-based synovial fluid injected in (I’m allergic to raw eggs). It took me an entire year to be able to straighten out my leg, even after five months of physical therapy.

Anyway, I digress; I went out for a night of dancing. Already I felt much older than everyone else at 34, when most of the crowd was 21-23, including my friend. Let me tell you, those young boys were not shy! One guy was just about stripped down from the waist up and he decided he was going to bump and grind all over my booty. I had to tell him to calm the fuck down because of my bad knee, so he just decided to hold onto my hips tighter while he pretended to bang me from behind.

I finally got away from him and had about two songs before a tall, lanky, tipsy drunk young man started dancing on me. I had an even harder time with him! He kept banging into my knee. After a while, I had enough. I convinced my friend it was time to go.

I didn’t know my friend did this, but she would read the “Missed Connections” portion of Craigslist for entertainment. She called me one night and said, “Holy crap, C., this is you!!”

Sure enough, a guy, aged 24, considered me a “missed connection” – meaning I didn’t give him my phone number when I headed out, basically. In the ad he wrote about how he “protected” my knee from everyone else. (Drunkass, you did no such thing.) I emailed him back and we traded a few emails, but I couldn’t pretend to be very interested. He was still at the binge-drinking phase.

The very first episode I listened to on Modern Love: The Podcast had to do with one woman’s experience with the “Missed Connections” section. It’s a short piece, especially if you just listen to the story and not the interview afterwards.

https://www.wbur.org/2016/01/20/missed-connection-modern-love

Me and Ziggy

Posted on by akiwifreund

 

Today may have been the first time that I have listened to “Ziggy Stardust” in its entirety since 1993.

David Bowie and I have a pretty solid history. When I was little, I loved the song “Space Oddity.” I don’t know if it’s because I’ve always felt a little out of place in my world, as if I’m living on a different plane than the general public, or quite possibly that I’m an alien trapped in a human body. Whatever the reason, I would sing that song over and over; I have always used singing as a sort of comfort to myself, like the proverbial blankie or stuffed animal.

When I was in elementary school, MTV was born. Our dad was pirating his cable from a neighbor’s wire and we had access to this fabulous station with music and stories 24/7. I loved the really creative videos that gave me interesting visuals to go along with the musicianship. It was the first time I actually saw David Bowie in motion thanks to his new wave pop tunes “China Girl” and “Let’s Dance.” In fact, the “Let’s Dance” album is the first one our father purchased to play on his brand new contraption, the CD player. If we jumped hard enough we could make the CD skip like a record. Our father’s side of the family was blessed with innate rhythm, so we would often have dance parties in our living room, sometimes including our aunt’s five children.

In high school, I joined one of those CD clubs – you know, buy one full price and get 11 more for 1 cent? I got a best of from Bowie that included all of my favorite songs up to that point. It got heavy play. I was listening to it during my first week on Mackinac Island for my second season after I had just turned 19, when I lived above the busiest bar on the island and we had a lot of people coming and going. That is when a guy knocked on my door, started making out with me and coaxed me out of my knickers and my virginity. “Ziggy Stardust” was the song playing when it all went down – I distinctly remember the guy drunkenly saying that he loved that song. I loved that song. Unfortunately, because I had resolved to just getting my virginity out of the way and not trying to make it a movie-type romance, it was not a good experience. He was very rough. He bruised me deeply, my lips were purple and cut. I had bruises all over my ribs, ass and thighs. He was drunk and he doubted it was my first time. My first sexual partner did not care for me or about me, and I paid the price. Well, me and Ziggy. I stopped playing that song.

When I was 22, I had been living in New Mexico when I flew back to be in a friend’s wedding. It was the last time my father and I saw each other. He had cut my hair (the “Rachael”) and we were chatting about his Bowie box set that he received from a client the week before. We also talked about this new cabin Dad had purchased two months prior, and how Dad intended to fix it up and retire there, but that he didn’t think he would see retirement. I told him frankly that I didn’t think he would live to retirement either. He asked me why I said that, and I told him that I couldn’t envision him as an old man, that everything went black when I tried, like a newly washed chalkboard. Three weeks later I had to fly back to Minnesota because Dad died of a heart attack – at the cabin he wanted to retire in. He had gone up there for a weekend by himself to work on a few things and maybe do a little duck hunting. From what we could tell, he entered the cabin, set down his pack, laid down on the bed and died. He was discovered by the local sheriff when my step-mom called for a wellness check after Dad didn’t return home at his scheduled time. The Bowie box set is one of the first things my step-mom thought to give me when she was dividing up mementos between us four kids. She knew Dad and I loved our David Bowie.

I believe in a continuation of the soul when we die. Relating to that, I have a question that I suppose will never be answered, but I’ll ask it anyway. When famous people die, and are so universally mourned, does their soul visit every single person every time they are thought of? Souls must be infinite, but is their energy ever depleted by the millions of times they are tugged and pulled by our sadness? Or do they only have a connection to the people they loved in their lives?

I’ll leave you with my favorite Bowie song, which is his collaboration with Queen. I get goosebumps every time I hear it.