I've never been a dancer. Felt out of place and uncomfortable at school dances. Only went because whatever girlfriend at the time insisted.
When I married Donna, we attended a Mozart event at the Kennedy Center, and afterward joined a party on the roof, stars above, Potomac below, a jazz band seducing everyone, champagne. DT led me out to the edge of the dancing and I warned I didn't dance. After cheerfully coaching me for awhile, she stopped still and with a look of mixed awe and disappointment, she said, "You're not kidding! You don't dance!"
Sometimes at Johnny Rocket's, DT would get up and dance with the staff. I watched adoringly, but not enviously--that was not my thing.
Then. In the week before Xmas 2009, I went on a "Vacation Course" with Landmark Education, a cruise in the eastern Caribbean. The theme of the course was an inquiry into "Celebration." The pre-course conference calls that began in September were so lame that I began to hunger to stir up the participants. One night over dinner I suggested to DT that next call I was going to introduce the observation that a public execution has all the characteristics of a celebration. She'd had a stressful day and I was now the last straw. She declared she wasn't going on the cruise, wasn't going to be trapped onboard a ship with a ghoulish lunatic, and wrapped up by insisting I "see someone."
I backpedaled rapidly and promised there would be no further talk of public executions, that I very much wanted to enjoy this course and cruise with her, and would behave myself.
So, sure enough, the course involved dancing. Warm up to start and cool down to end each session. Hokey Pokey, Macarena, improv, everything I hate and feel left out of, and feel too clumsy for.
The course leader, Brian Regnier, asked us to look for that disempowering conversation that prevents our participation in celebration. Oh! Well. For me, it is that celebrating is synonymous with mindlessness: drinking, dancing, loud music, loud laughing, people intentionally get mindless. And mindless crowds are dangerous, very dangerous. Do you need me to cite evidence?
Then Brian asked what disempowering conversation about ourselves would have generated that conversation about other people. Oh! OK. I remember--but remember is too soft a word. There were occasions between age 5 and age 7 where Pop so powerfully humiliated me, that I must've made some ontological decisions about who and what I am, and some survival decisions about how I'd need to be in a world of humiliation. Oh! My disempowering conversation about myself is that I'm weak, pathetic and a laughingstock.
Ah! So I hide that, and avoid celebrations where hiding might be difficult.
But! The ontological speaking that followed the 7 year old's realization that he was weak, pathetic and ludicrous was to be none of those things. So I grew up to be real smart, a good trial attorney, a good computer programmer, a good father, a community leader--and a leader of humor, a director of humor, not the butt of it. So at 58, i simply have no data to support feelings of being weak, pathetic and ludicrous. Looked at critically, that conversation is just a lie.
Well, what then? How does one unhide or transcend the 7 year old one has been hiding? Yep. Get up and dance with the servers at Johnny Rocket's. And I did that on the cruise ship. And danced at every party and course room. And been dancing since. Eating lunch with my daughter, Natalie, yesterday, the restaurant was playing zydeco and I was bouncing in my booth, dancing with my fingers on the table and she reached over and suppressed me!
This line from Arthur Miller's "After The Fall" is what I'm doing:
I tried to die near the end of the war. The same dream returned each night until I dared not to go to sleep and grew quite ill. I dreamed I had a child, and even in the dream I saw it was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away. But it always crept onto my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it was my own, perhaps I could sleep. And I bent to its broken face, and it was horrible ... but I kissed it. I think one must finally take one's life in one's arms.
. . . if I could dance with it, perhaps it would turn to wings!
When I married Donna, we attended a Mozart event at the Kennedy Center, and afterward joined a party on the roof, stars above, Potomac below, a jazz band seducing everyone, champagne. DT led me out to the edge of the dancing and I warned I didn't dance. After cheerfully coaching me for awhile, she stopped still and with a look of mixed awe and disappointment, she said, "You're not kidding! You don't dance!"
Sometimes at Johnny Rocket's, DT would get up and dance with the staff. I watched adoringly, but not enviously--that was not my thing.
Then. In the week before Xmas 2009, I went on a "Vacation Course" with Landmark Education, a cruise in the eastern Caribbean. The theme of the course was an inquiry into "Celebration." The pre-course conference calls that began in September were so lame that I began to hunger to stir up the participants. One night over dinner I suggested to DT that next call I was going to introduce the observation that a public execution has all the characteristics of a celebration. She'd had a stressful day and I was now the last straw. She declared she wasn't going on the cruise, wasn't going to be trapped onboard a ship with a ghoulish lunatic, and wrapped up by insisting I "see someone."
I backpedaled rapidly and promised there would be no further talk of public executions, that I very much wanted to enjoy this course and cruise with her, and would behave myself.
So, sure enough, the course involved dancing. Warm up to start and cool down to end each session. Hokey Pokey, Macarena, improv, everything I hate and feel left out of, and feel too clumsy for.
The course leader, Brian Regnier, asked us to look for that disempowering conversation that prevents our participation in celebration. Oh! Well. For me, it is that celebrating is synonymous with mindlessness: drinking, dancing, loud music, loud laughing, people intentionally get mindless. And mindless crowds are dangerous, very dangerous. Do you need me to cite evidence?
Then Brian asked what disempowering conversation about ourselves would have generated that conversation about other people. Oh! OK. I remember--but remember is too soft a word. There were occasions between age 5 and age 7 where Pop so powerfully humiliated me, that I must've made some ontological decisions about who and what I am, and some survival decisions about how I'd need to be in a world of humiliation. Oh! My disempowering conversation about myself is that I'm weak, pathetic and a laughingstock.
Ah! So I hide that, and avoid celebrations where hiding might be difficult.
But! The ontological speaking that followed the 7 year old's realization that he was weak, pathetic and ludicrous was to be none of those things. So I grew up to be real smart, a good trial attorney, a good computer programmer, a good father, a community leader--and a leader of humor, a director of humor, not the butt of it. So at 58, i simply have no data to support feelings of being weak, pathetic and ludicrous. Looked at critically, that conversation is just a lie.
Well, what then? How does one unhide or transcend the 7 year old one has been hiding? Yep. Get up and dance with the servers at Johnny Rocket's. And I did that on the cruise ship. And danced at every party and course room. And been dancing since. Eating lunch with my daughter, Natalie, yesterday, the restaurant was playing zydeco and I was bouncing in my booth, dancing with my fingers on the table and she reached over and suppressed me!
This line from Arthur Miller's "After The Fall" is what I'm doing:
I tried to die near the end of the war. The same dream returned each night until I dared not to go to sleep and grew quite ill. I dreamed I had a child, and even in the dream I saw it was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away. But it always crept onto my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it was my own, perhaps I could sleep. And I bent to its broken face, and it was horrible ... but I kissed it. I think one must finally take one's life in one's arms.
. . . if I could dance with it, perhaps it would turn to wings!
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Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
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