Morning Butt – Dancing With Tears in My Eyes

I love dancing. If I could, I would dance all day long, wearing nothing but oversized sweaters and dancing micro pants and legwarmers that go up to the thigh, and maybe t-shirts with cut sleeves, if I really got into it. Oh no, don’t get me wrong, I am nothing like the lovely welder/dancer girl Alex from Flashdance when I dance. Even farther is Madonna’s chair routine from Open Your Heart video. Beyoncé? Forget it!

If you have seen St. Elmo’s Fire, pay close attention to Kirby’s huge party scene. I’m Andrew McCarthy, dancing crazy to Man in Motion. That’s exactly how I dance. That, and Molly Ringwald going at it in the library dancing montage in The Breakfast Club. That, and the opening sequence of Footloose, with all the different kinds of feet in different kinds of shoes, dancing and jumping and pumping and skipping. That, my friends, is I, dancing.

With all my love for it, I have never been to dance classes. I am naturally bendy, and I guess I’m in the ballpark of able-to-count-my-beat -appropriate, but me and dancing have never crossed paths in any semi hobby-like way.

Well, except for when I was in junior high school, and the very cool new gym teacher started giving “Disco Dancing” lessons after school, where practically every girl who had ever listened to some Madonna or Michael Jackson ran screaming, both because it was free, and because, despite the enormity of our school – over seven hundred pupils – nothing cool was ever on the agenda, never. I use the quotation marks not because of poor teaching or anything like that; they are there because I don’t think this kind of class would be categorized as Disco per se anymore. Maybe “Street Dance”, or “Feel Good Dancing”, or “Eighties Insanity Incarnate”. This hip new teacher with her fun MC Hammer interpretations and always fun music really touched us, and awoke the sleeping Baby in all of us. There were probably a hundred eager girls packed in the gym hall, taking up all the space there, at best. Of course, not everyone really got into it, and the numbers thinned so that we were actually able to hear her instructions in class.

Because it was the early Nineties, our teacher of course brought her own boom box with mixtapes she had prepared, and after warming up, learning a few dance moves and sometimes just going crazy on the dance floor - this was always encouraged and I carry it with me to this day, I just adore the idea of the “Dance Like No One Is Watching” tote bags and all the by-products of that slogan, the latest being I believe H&M’s spring line’s Run –version written on the sweatshirt, which, yes, I own two - there was always the grueling abs and other muscle groups part with the hammering techno beat, which I always managed to block out until the next time when she announced: “Ok, on the floor, let’s do the abs to get it out of the way!” For other than doing the painful abs, smiling, even laughing while doing the moves, was applauded, and sometimes our classes were laughs fests, too.

But, like things tend to go, when I got a bit older, and didn’t go to that school anymore, also my wild dancing stopped. I really wanted to take more classes, but we lived in the country, and, yes, even then, it was sort of expensive. And maybe I didn’t want it that much, anyway. Not as much as having, say, a car. One has to pick one’s battles, sometimes, and therefore, for about twenty years, my dancing all but stopped altogether.

When I moved to my current hometown, I went through a lengthy undertaking of trying to find a dance class that suited my hours and my mental mode. Times had certainly changed since I had hopped and skipped to the beat the last time, and now, it seemed, everybody was all about looking cool, moving like and I mean exactly like they were in an R’n’B video. I didn’t want to dance like that. Don’t get me wrong here, either. Bey getting in formation with her ladies looks absolutely riveting. Flash mobs doing Thriller give me the goosebumps. I even loved Magic Mike 2. That’s not it. It just isn’t my thing, I don’t want to dance like I’m counting when to do the kick, except if I feel like kicking just then. Not being Rihanna of course helps, because sometimes the fabulous dance routines just have to have timed kicks in them.

At an especially desperate time, when I was trying to lose some weight some years ago, I went so far as to actually buy some dancing sneakers, and real beauties, too, all black and gold with the extra support for the ball of the foot, and because I’m a woman, they just had to be Nikes. So yeah, basically I bought a hundred euro pair of specific sports gear on a fantasy that by just owning the shoes I would, by sorcery, or osmosis straight out of the shoes, develop incredible dancing skills, lose the extra weight I had put on, would immediately be able to do the splits and back flips, and what have you. Alas, this magical skill transference never happened, and after a few attempts to find possible dance lessons for someone who works nights that are not Pregnant Yoga, or Senior Citizen’s Easy Stretching, I gave up, storing the unused trainers in my closet.

Because of my recurring back problems, I was awakened to a revelation about a year ago, when I was once more complaining about my aching muscles and back spasms to my man, who, without much sympathy, replied, that I was always complaining about my back, and what if, instead of always complaining, I just tried and did something about it? It might be a nice change. OMG but that would mean returning to the land of having to do the abs, my initial thought was. But isn’t the point of doing the abs, and the back training, sort of how one gets a stronger middle? my second thought more or less went. Oh, and I might look nicer, too, my third thought went, because everyone knows the morning butt and evening butt are two completely different butts, The Lorelai continued inside my head. For the past few years I may have had an evening butt, which was not that bad, my walking routine made sure my rear end had never been on my most-urgent-to-deal-with -list, but hey, maybe getting to know what a decent morning butt was like would be an added bonus to my enterprise.

Yes, the horrible, horrible abs, but why not combine it to something similarly fun, like when I was a young girl, rushing to the gym after school to dance my young girl ass off with the rest of the school’s Flashdance society? “You know what, you’re absolutely right! Later!” I told my man, leaving him flabbergasted, holding a coffee mug, unbelieving I was, for once, taking him up on an advice. I rushed over to a clothes store, because I am like The Lorelai Gilmore in this way, too, and bought myself some sweats, came back home, searched for some dance tunes on Tidal, and thought, ok, let’s look at this like the quitting of smoking all those years ago. No pressure, it’s fine if after five minutes I want to stop, and no counting! Absolutely no counting, let’s have the time frame of a song here. If I can go a song with trying to do the abdominals, it’s money in the bank.

And so it began. My crazy dancing alone in the apartment. Also, bit by bit, the abs and back muscle toning. Since there was no one else around when I danced, I was able to really go with it, just jump around, hands flailing, if I felt like it, and I can tell you I hadn’t felt so good about myself in ages! I was, after a while, able to reach such a high in my wild, Eighties dancing, that I was actually reduced to tears, by some magical emotional outreach through the physical exercise. It was something I had never before experienced; yes, I had cried before during sports, but never out of pleasure, always in pain, especially during those endless cross-country skiing trips we were obligated to participate in school.

Ever since my dancing trainers debacle many years ago, I now go for it barefoot, and love it so much I wouldn’t dream of trainers anymore. I have long since sold them on a second-hand internet market, and good riddance, too. Didn’t Jennifer Beals also go barefoot in Flashdance?

I haven’t done the Top Fives in a while, so here is my personal five of dance movies:

Shall We Dance? This is a guilty pleasure movie for me. I just love Stanley Tucci in this film – I guess I love him in whatever film – and I love the idea of this: a middle-aged man reaching out of his bored existence and set-in ways, and finding a true love for dancing itself, not for the much younger, beautiful dancing instructor.

Footloose. This is just crazy, a true poster film for wild dancing, and how cool is the young Kevin Bacon in his black leather tie, cruising in his yellow Volkswagon Beetle? Bonus points for John Lithgow and Dianne Wiest as the Reverend and his wife. And of course, the opening credits with the stomping and the kicking and the colorful sneakers and boots and shoes.

Girls Just Want to Have Fun. I know for many others this spot would be reserved for Dirty Dancing, and I do love it, but this movie was on TV for some reason a lot when I was a girl, and I taped it and proceeded to watch the ridiculously young Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt dancing so many times I think I still remember the whole movie, line by line, even if I have never since stumbled on this anywhere ever, not in DVD format, not on Netflix, nowhere. “My name is Lynn Stone, and I’m changing it as soon as I’m old enough!”

Flashdance. I referred to this movie three times already above, and for a good reason. There is no one hotter, more intense, or more fabulous a dancer onscreen, than Jennifer Beals. I love her character’s apartment, her blue-collar job, her dog, the cinematography, the crazy training montage, the outline of the city visible in all the shots outside, the fact that she rides a bike, the music, the costumes, everything. But most of all I love the fact that, when auditioning at the end of the movie in front of all those stiff-looking people, she is so nervous she at first stumbles in her footing and asks to start over. This is pure cinematic brilliance.

Silver Linings Playbook. The ultimate hey-let’s-start-dancing-to-improve-ourselves-as-people-and-get-over-some-really-bad-times –movie. There is nothing to not love, and no topic more relevant in the world today. It’s the most eloquently put declaration of Do What You Love I have ever seen. I think everybody should be subjected to at least two viewings of this movie per five years. Brad and Jennifer (you know, Cooper and Lawrence) have such a killer chemistry, and their crazy dancing? I so totally approve. More to follow on this topic later.

I know I know, I left out many pivotal dance movies. Well. It’s my list, and yes, yes, I do have copies of Funny Face and Grease and Saturday Night Fever handy. Still, my list holds.

I was on an outing with some of my work mates last year, it was part of a prize we had won over some sales contest, and I got to talking with a colleague I knew only somewhat. After bonding over some other key factors one has to bond over before divulging important and intimate details about oneself, I admitted to him that I danced crazy when I was alone, to relieve tension and to relax and just for the fun, and that I had my dancing gear with me on that outing as well. “Guess what?” he replied, conspiratorially, “I sing!” We both cracked up at that moment, and had we been high-fiving type of people, there would have been one right there. I could have screamed out loud with delight, and maybe I did. Sometimes you just ended with exactly the right person to talk to, matching your insanity to the bone.

For my work mates B.R. and K.T. High five!