Image by sattva, freedigitalphotos.net
I love to dance. At concerts, in my living room, in my car, at my desk, in the shower, it doesn’t really matter where. If a good song comes on-whether it’s live, on the radio, on my iPod, or just in my head-I’m compelled to start bopping a body part or two.
I don’t care if I’m dancing with myself. Sure it’s nice to have a husband who likes to join along, but it’s definitely not as essential as I once thought it was. I remember when I was in my 20’s and one of my friends was contemplating marrying a guy who didn’t like to dance. I counseled her against it because I couldn’t imagine spending decades alone on the dance floor.
I didn’t know at that point that by the time she celebrated her tenth anniversary, every adult function we went to the dance floor ratio would be 20 women for every single man. But even if we were all out there dancing by ourselves, no one would care anymore.
Besides, it’s fun to dance to your own tune.
Sometimes my son joins me and sometimes he just laughs at me as I try to restrain myself around his friends. I get it. I know I look silly but I don’t really care.
I used to care. I used to care way too much about a lot of stupid things. But now I look at my younger self-conscious self through the rear view mirror and she makes me laugh out loud and remind myself to dance like no one’s watching, but not caring if they do.
There’s something about middle-aged people rocking out that makes me smile just thinking about it. Our aging bodies may be weighing us down, but somehow music takes us to a lighter place. I can’t think of a better gift.
A lot of grey-ish heads were bopping in the audience at the Lobero this week when Joan Armatrading performed. I loved it. The fact that many of us in the audience (possibly even most of us) had first seen Armatrading perform decades ago only added to the fun both on and off stage. No one cared if they had two left feet-and some of us had as many as three or four-it was all about having fun and enjoying the music.
Plus no one had their kids there to make fun of them.
Apparently mocking your parents’ moves is a universal childhood rite-of-passage. Even Madonna’s teenage daughter Lourdes reportedly got embarrassed, covered her face and blogged about her mom’s dorky enthusiastic dancing at a recent Jay-Z concert.
“My mom was dancing the entire time which is LOL now that I think about it,” she wrote, “but in the moment I was just like, ‘mom, no, please no.'”
If Madonna can no longer be “cool” while dancing, then surely there’s no hope for the rest of us.
That’s okay. I can live with that-just don’t ask me to stop dancing.