I love to dance. There, I said it.
It’s actually a hard thing for me to admit, but I said it already so let’s move on. I love to dance and now you know it.
Dancing makes me happy, pure and simple. It’s so reliable in that way, like my kids, or freshly grilled hot dogs on a summer day.
And it’s not just a casual thing either. It’s not like every once in a while when the time is right I’ll dance a little, at a concert or something, and that’s it. It’s much more than that.
I make time for dancing these days, and this can also be hard to do. I have a very full life. My wife and I are raising two young kids. I run a company. And I’m truly dedicated to both, which means there’s not much time left over for my personal interests. But I do take the time to dance. Sometimes I dance every day, sometimes once a week, rarely is it less than that.
I mostly dance at home in this little studio I pieced together in the garage. It’s just a clean ten by ten foot space with a smooth concrete floor. There’s a collage of mirrors up against the wall, each at a slightly different angle, offering several points of view from which I can deconstruct my moves in real time. When it’s warm out I’ll go on our back patio and dance. There are no mirrors there but the fresh air is lovely and I close my eyes most of the time anyway.
But for all of my love and passion for dancing, I still get this weird feeling inside when I talk about it. I have suspicions as to why, but no real knowledge. There seems to be remnants of grade school self-consciousness and shame still roiling inside, and the fact is I still care too much about what people think.
Ever since I was a kid I’ve always loved dance, at least from afar. The first album I ever bought was Michael Jackson’s Thriller. It was 1983 and I’d just turned seven years old. The whole album was killer, and of course Michael’s moves were god-like. But when it came to me, I was absolutely convinced I was a horrible dancer. I had no rhythm, no confidence. I also knew no one who danced well or really danced at all. The thought of trying to dance like Michael, of trying the moonwalk perhaps, even just for myself in my bedroom, was terrifying. So I didn’t do much dancing back then.
If I saw anybody else dancing though, I could sit and watch them for hours, at street festivals or concerts, even if the person was a bad dancer. Because how inspiring is it to see someone go all in on the dance floor, holding nothing back, without a care in the world? It’s exhilarating to be in the presence of someone so free, who doesn’t give a shit what others might say. Great dancers bring a whole different set of feelings. Their rhythmic and sensuous movements make me swoon. The clear realization that anyone dancing at any skill level was inherently beautiful didn’t change a thing for me. There was no way I was getting out on the dance floor no matter what.
Fast forward to late high school and I started loosening up a bit, mostly because of alcohol, but also because I fell so hard for music that it became everything for me. I’d dance drunk now and again. I also took a real liking to mosh pits and had some legendary moments banging hard and joyfully with the crowd.
My loosening continued in college, and by the time my senior year rolled around I got hooked on a style of music that sat at the intersection of jazz and techno. I started going to the occasional dance party to get my groove on, and every once in a while my friends and I would go dancing at a hip music club. It was still alcohol that opened me up for the most part. On a crowded dance floor there was also this feeling that I was anonymous, that nobody really saw me or was going to judge me. True or not, it was helpful.
A few years later I met Julie, who’s now my wife and the mother of my children. She’s an amazing dancer, so unbelievably sexy and free spirited when she moves. She had these thick golden braids that fell below her waist and they’d flow back and forth as she stepped and twirled. I was mesmerized by her hips and her fearlessness, and we’d go out dancing until the bars closed at four in the morning. We’d dance at concerts, parties, weddings. I’ll never forget Dave’s wedding in Peru when we danced all night to the Latin jazz band and owned the floor. People kept approaching us to complement our dancing and some even asked how it was that we learned La Marinera, a traditional Peruvian courtship dance. We knew absolutely nothing about it, but it turns out things like this tend to happen when Julie’s your dance partner.
That whole time in my life was awesome as far as dancing goes. I developed a bit of confidence and a style of my own, and there were many transcendent evenings on dance floors all over Buffalo and beyond. That’s how things went for the next ten years until our son was born.
I was thirty-five when Desmond arrived. Julie and I gladly embraced parenthood and had no trouble making the shift from late nights with friends to becoming full-on homebodies. It felt right and there were no regrets. Desmond was also the greatest thing that had ever happened to either of us by a long shot.
Five years later, the summer after I turned forty, right around the time I gave up drinking, dancing shot right back into my life, and as far as I’m concerned there’s no going back, ever.
I still remember the moment with perfect clarity. I was sitting at the dining room table by myself on a Saturday morning staring at my phone. Nothing productive was going on, just mindless scrolling and skimming things I had no real interest in. Then I came across a short YouTube video that changed everything.
It was a dance tutorial given by a girl from Toronto. She was teaching the running man, a step I remembered vaguely from my days watching The Fresh Prince of Bel Air as a kid. But this was a different running man. It was more streamlined and refined and set to hard-thumping electronic dance music. I was transfixed. As I watched I also learned that the running man is the foundational step for a style of dance called shuffling, which is quite popular in clubs these days. Just like that I needed to learn the running man. I needed to learn how to shuffle too. There was no question about it.
I watched that tutorial over and over the next few days as I did the running man to moderately paced electronica to get the movements down. The feet, the hips, the legs, everything must flow together in concert. Slowly I got myself moving to the beat. It was rough at first, clumsy, uncoordinated, like learning anything for the first time. But I was in this for the long haul, and I kept at it.
In the beginning I was also totally closeted about it. I’d surreptitiously do the running man in five and ten minute increments when I had a brief window of time to myself. The fact is I was totally embarrassed to be fascinated by this dance tutorial. I was ashamed to tell Julie that I was secretly and devotedly learning the running man. So I kept this up for a week and then realized I couldn’t keep it inside any longer.
I sat Julie down on our back patio one warm summer night. I was nervous. In my mind I was about to reveal a deep, humiliating secret.
“Hey,” I said.
“Yes?” Julie’s eyes locked with mine.
“I’ve been learning the running man for the past week. I’m learning to shuffle too. There’s this video tutorial I’ve been watching...”
I showed her the video on my phone.
“I’m just really into this and I’m super excited about it and I’m also feeling totally insecure and uneasy.”
Julie smiled warmly and giggled cutely and then looked at me encouragingly.
“That’s great Christian. I was worried for a second. I thought you were going to tell me something bad.” She also mentioned she noticed how young and beautiful the dance instructor was and then laughed again.
Just like that a massive weight lifted off my shoulders and I felt free. I felt incredible.
“Wow, that was easy. I’m going to head to the garage and work on my moves for a little bit then.”
I walked away towards another liberating session of dance.
That was almost five years ago, and ever since then I’ve been going out to the garage almost religiously to shuffle. I’ve learned lots of moves by now, and I’ve also gotten pretty good if I may say so.
It’s surprising to me how casual this has all become. A few weeks ago I found Julie and Des in the living room and announced I was going to “shuffle and then shower.” They both nodded casually and immediately returned to whatever they were doing. It went over like the most normal thing in the world.
Recently I told a few very close friends about my shuffling. I even made a short video of me dancing in the backyard and texted it to them. Again, once I got out of my own way, no big deal.
To me dancing is like a mini celebration of life itself, of the crazy beauty of the simple things that bring us joy.
I often think of a Gogol Bordello concert Julie and I went to just before I started shuffling. A mosh pit broke out in the center of the floor and I so wanted to jump in. But I didn’t. I felt old and self-conscious and I was unwilling to let go. I felt like such a loser.
Julie could sense it. She kept encouraging me to get out there and I kept replying with every lame excuse I could think of.
As I stood there feeling sorry for myself I began to realize that I’d felt like this so many times before in my life. When I was afraid to dance because people might see my arms flailing freakishly or my feet missing the beat. When I was afraid to just be me, because I feared that people wouldn’t like what they saw, and maybe they wouldn’t like me because of it. Those were some of the times in my life I most regretted.
I leaned over to Julie. “I’m going in.” I was excited now and so was she.
I weaved my way through the crowd and threw myself into the mosh pit. I totally lost myself in there, thrashing to the music. There was no thought of anything else. No work deadlines. No fear. No doubt. No shame. Just a glorious energy that was pouring out of me and everyone else.
At the end of the show, almost an hour after I’d entered, I emerged from the mosh pit. I stood there in the middle of the floor drenched in sweat. My shirt was completely soaked through and stuck to my chest and back. It was triumphant.
On the way out I bought a t-shirt at the merch table and changed into it on the spot. Then Julie and I held each other as we walked to our car, saying nothing but communicating so clearly with our movements and our touch.