If you are a like me, you can lay claim to friendships that cross pretty much every spectrum available here in the “City of Angles” (which is the proper spelling of our town). And amongst those, if you are like me, there exists a large proportion of NDs (Non-Dancers), who can only be coaxed onto a dance floor by laying down a trail of shrimp and candy for them to follow from the buffet, or waving copious amounts of cash under their noses, and/or allowing them to imbibe enough booze until they’re finally loose enough to lose their inhibition on the parquet.
Left to their own devices, some of our ND friends, while admiring our freedom and creativity out there, view venturing onto the floor themselves as the musical equivalent of performing a walk on hot coals, and wonder why we do it. So if you’re like me, and have been asked more than once why we will sometimes spend hours in a car to get to some venue where we’ll spend more hours and energy dancing our butts off, just to have to crawl back into our vehicles and somehow find enough residual energy to make our way home when we could have just gone to dinner or to a movie here are some answers you can feed them.
Top Twenty-Five Reasons Why We Love Dancing:
1. We love dancing because something about the music strikes a spark in our souls that will threaten to engulf us in a flame unless we stamp it out to a rhythm through our soles, thus not only saving our lives but also enriching them.
2. We love dancing because nothing flushes out the doldrums and pains of a bad day than moving to our favorite beat with people who feel the same way.
3. We love dancing because we’re bad at it, but some day hope to be deliciously good at it.
4. We love dancing because we’re good at it; especially on the days it lets us feel free to be deliciously bad.
5. We love dancing because they still haven’t figured out a way to tax this pleasure.
6. We love dancing because it’s about the most fun you can have with another person with all your clothing more or less intact (Hah! Take that Parcheesi!).
7. We love dancing because we get to touch, and move and create with others of our ilk and in doing so we ourselves are recreated, moved and touched.
8. We love dancing for the few times that we get it right.
9. We love dancing for all the times that we get it wrong but we’re having a ball in our attempts at a do-over.
10. We love dancing for those rare times when in getting it wrong we actually create something new and wondrous (now if we could just figure out how to do it again!!!!!)
11. We love dancing because it takes us back to a time when we were innocent and Mommy or Daddy took us out on the floor with the big folks during Crazy Uncle Alvy’s wedding reception (which lasted about as long as his marriage to Aunt “Boom-Boom” Cecile, but that’s another story), and we got to ride on their feet as they danced to Nat King Cole.
12. We love dancing because every time we hear a Nat King Cole song, it’s a sweet reminder to call our parents and thank them for that memory.
13. We love dancing because once we realized that our pants weren’t actually shrinking in the laundry, this was a much more enjoyable way to handle the problem than joining a gym.
14. We love dancing because no matter how long we stay away from it, it always welcomes us back with open arms and it’s just as good as it always was.
15. We love dancing because it takes us back to how our hearts pounded in our chest so loudly that we could barely hear ourselves ask Homecoming Queen Beebe Anne Wallenda to come out onto the floor to a very slow song during the fifth grade sock hop, even though part of the reason we’d done so was just to get Chris “motor-mouth” Chang to shut the heck up after he dared us to do it for a solid half hour from the boy’s side of the room, and we still don’t know how we got all the way across the gym without our knees buckling, but by some miracle….
16. We love dancing because it takes us back to how our hearts pounded in our chests at the fifth grade sock hop when we were wondering if any of those stupid boys were ever going to get the nerve to cross the gym floor to ask us to dance (especially now that we were the Homecoming Queen which was a pressure, we definitely never asked for) when out of nowhere, Rodney Korduner was there asking us to do a slow-drag and the impudence of the question actually sparked a feeling in us that we’d never experienced before, so before we knew it we were on the dance floor. But we still don’t know why Chris “motor-mouth” Chang fainted in the middle of it all.
17. We love dancing because the Wallenda-Korduner grandkids love to hear that story.
18. We love dancing because it provides both individual and communal satisfactions at the same time.
19. We love dancing because nothing makes us feel more energetic than having survived a set where the DJ or bandleader decided to test our limits by progressively increasing the pace of the music, while at the same time progressively increasing the popularity and quality of the music to the point where it was impossible to leave the dance floor, and we got through it all and didn’t need the defibrillator.
20. We love dancing because when someone asks us on Monday how our weekend went, there’s a really good reason for our wry smile.
21. We love dancing because somehow, someway, it gives us back more than it ever asks us to pay.
22. We love dancing because it’s like having flying dreams, but you’re on the ground and you’re not dreaming, it’s real.
23. We love dancing because it makes our toes giggle.
24. We love dancing because dancing loves us back.
25. We love dancing because just why we love dancing can never be properly expressed in a simple list. It would either take a lifetime to explain in words, or five minutes in movement and spirit and joy. So if you really want to know just why we love dancing, step with us onto a floor and you’ll see for yourself.
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