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This past month I found myself doing something unexpected: I joined a dance class. I consider myself a “good” dancer but by that I mean I can stand in one place and move semi-erotically if under the influence of several strong drinks. It does not mean that I can follow directions or move my arms and legs in different ways at the same time. It wasn’t that type of dance class anyway. It was… something else altogether, something much needed in the midst of a very difficult month.
Before the first class session I drove nervously, from my boring capital city into the artsier, fartsier one across the river. I was preparing myself to experience the class in that sick little way writers often do: to enter the space as a rodent, there only to squirrel away little bits of data for later usage. Despite this, my rat self felt soothed by the circle-sitting and imaginative sharing that we started off with; when the music began to pulse through the speakers I suddenly no longer had fur. I was a lithe sylph in a gelatinous, glittering universe, and every move I made sent powerful sparks into the ether. When (as my friend C had prepared me to expect) the teacher suggested we imagine that our palms and the soles of our feet had orifices in them, it all seemed to make perfect sense. I could feel the gaping sphincters, undulating, open and hungry for the rest of the evening’s experience.
I felt young those nights, but a young I never was: unselfconscious and energetically present, my body pounding across the long wooden floor. Even my armpits had a new smell to them—when I came home after the first class, Jimmy announced: “Phew! You smell like Troy!”
The second week of class I made the executive decision to pack my sneakers, the pair with the orthotic insoles tucked inside. The teacher admitted that they, too, wore a sneaker with an orthotic insert, and I felt buoyed. Midway through class, supported by the memory foam under my foot-sphincters, two things happened. First, the teacher lead us through our first attempt at real choreography—a twist on the electric slide that involved changing directions and spinning in circles, two things that began to humble me from eternal-spirit back to human-woman. Second, the teacher announced that at the Big Dance Party that upcoming weekend, we would be performing this number, breaking through the crowd of regular dancers to reveal the majesty of our dance.
C had been telling me about this party for some time, mentioning it again and again in various text messages to me and others. It seemed so far removed from my normal Saturday night plans that I could barely process the data of her texts; I had simply ignored them. But now I was invited in a new way to the party: as a performer myself; I was being given a new opportunity, so rarely offered in this life, to be part of a living musical. I hadn’t thought this dance class was for me, and here I was, drenched in an unfamiliar sweat, eyes glistening with pleasure—what else didn’t I know about myself? Maybe I would go?
There were a few things about the party that made me nervous. One, it represented a final threshold of my post-pandemic behavior. I have been to lots of crowded events, but often still mask—airplanes, concerts, etcetera. I had not yet found myself in a situation where I was called to commune with hundreds of my panting freak brethren in an unventilated and abandoned Masonic temple. The second thing was that the party began at 9pm, a time when I am usually rolled up into the fetal position listening to six and a half minutes of my Agatha Raisin audiobook before passing out completely.
But it was too late. I’d bought the ticket; I’d roped another friend, T, in. With the perfectly blended combination of a nap, caffeine, alcohol, and friendship, staying up late would be possible. It would be fine. Also: I deserved this. All of the difficult and unpleasant things that had befallen me in the previous month would be blasted away by loud music, the darkness of the night sky, the perceived immortality of an evening’s freedom, of feeling young again.
Saturday arrived and the day slunk along into evening. I was tired, but tried to ignore it. I had bigger problems, such as: what would I wear? C had sent me various selfies over the previous week, of things she’d dug up at the thrift store: a turquoise jazzercise costume that looked like a “man’s bathing suit from the 1920s,” a brown velvet tunic that glowed like a freshly turned soil. I dug around in my closet and dumped everything on the bed that hadn’t been worn in months, years: a yellow kaftan, a silk slip, a woven vest. Nothing was weird enough, somehow, or bright enough, or sexy enough. I dug out a little black dress I’d never worn—it had fit, at one point, and then not fit. I hadn’t tried it on since I was still breastfeeding, and the zipper wouldn’t make it past my ribcage. Now, years later, and slightly deflated, it zipped up easily. It was time to go.
The first stop was C’s house. Friends from all over upstate were in town, just for this party. Someone had made a batch of Negronis. I requested one. My desire to drink alcohol (lose control) warred with my desire to drive myself to the party and home afterwards (maintain control). I thought it would be safe to have one drink, maybe two, and several slices of the gluten-free pizza coming out of the oven. I helped myself to a slice and introduced myself to the party-goers around the kitchen table. One friend, it turned out, was a friend of Jimmy’s I had never met before.
“Can you imagine Jimmy at this dance party?” the friend asked, and I considered it. I couldn't really, though not because I couldn’t imagine him having fun, or dancing. We’ve been to a lot of weddings together and Jimmy has a signature dance move—he calls it the Mase but I would call it The Jungle Book—looks like he’s trying to use the trunk of an imaginary tree to scratch an itch on his back. It works, in my opinion.
Apparently the topic had come up in their group text, and Jimmy had responded that he was “not allowed” to come to this party because his dance moves were “too sexual.” “It’s funny,” said the new friend, “but I don’t really think of Jimmy as being very sexual!”
“Um, good?” I said, frowning. “I do!”
It was such a weird thing to say that I just put the rest of the pizza in my mouth and walked back to the living room. There was T at the door, and we hugged, suddenly feeling as though we’d just made it through customs after a long, international journey. We worked our way through the once-familiar customs of going out; we sipped our drinks; I offered makeup from my bag and she from hers; she applied a last minute coat of iridescent nail polish; I modeled the choice between the black boots I’d come in and the orthotic sneakers I’d packed for dancing. In an effort to defend the sexiness of my nuclear family, I stuck with the boots. The Negroni dissolved in my bloodstream without leaving a trace. I drove us to the venue.
At the door of the party we offered up our IDs and were lead through a list of rules printed in neon colors on a chalkboard. I was grateful to see what the young people are up to these days: the rules involved respect, with a zero tolerance policy for racist or sexist or homophobic or transphobic language, with an enormous emphasis on consent. You’d need to ask, the chalkboard reminded us, before touching someone.
I recalled, suddenly, one of the more debauched evenings of my early 20s, spent in Atlantic City for a friend’s birthday party. I have two memories of the trip. The first: me and the other girls getting ready to go out, the contents of our makeup bags spilled out across the blood-red polyester duvets of the horrible motel. Each of us had our own square black compact of NARS blush. “What color do you have,” one friend asked, and the others replied: “Orgasm.” “No no,” said my cousin, grabbing mine. “Next time get this one,” she said, holding it up to her pale skin, a similar shade to mine. “It’s called Deep Throat.”
The second memory: in our pink blush, dancing at The 40/40 Club, owned at the time by Jay-Z himself, where the Heineken bottles were sixteen dollars each. Feeling something strange, I turned around to see a man bent over, taking an actual bite of my right ass cheek. My cousin chased him down, gnashing her own teeth at him with glee. This was obviously the kind of thing the Troy dance party was trying to avoid.
The rules on the chalkboard also implored party-goers to “check their stuff.” Fentanyl test strips, the woman who was welcoming us explained, were available at various locations around the party. I have actually never done a drug in my life (not counting weed) and I was shocked. Were people really doing heroin at the dance party? Didn’t heroin make you want to lay down and later, have diarrhea? T, savvier than me in so many ways, explained that these days everything could have fentanyl in it: acid, coke, pills of any kind—whatever else people might be doing out of a desire to let go and/or, probably, stay awake for the entirety of the party.
We entered the venue and looked around. It was so fun to see everyone’s outfits! Fake fur stoles, mesh tank tops, glittering tights. Music rattled in the speakers. I recognized a friend, a neighbor, and then another friend. I leaned in for an embrace, smiling as the friend complimented my appearance. I did look good, actually, now that she mentioned it, thanks! Pulling away from the hug, I heard her express how surprised she was to see me out, in a place like this. “I mean that in the best way,” she added, after watching my face fall. I, too, was surprised that I was there. But I did not want other people to be surprised. I had been known to have fun a time or two in my life, hadn’t I? HADN’T I?
Sure, the last four years of my life had been more or less spent chasing a naked child in circles around our dusty house, and the rest of the time I was at work, wearing these not-actually-that-sexy-now-that-I-really-look-at-them square toed ankle boots, trying to maintain a sense of relevance amongst students who were perpetually the same age, 19, no matter how many years I worked there; peering at the one white curly hair poking out of my chin/scalp as the teens in the campus bathroom talked about how they were going to do something cool that weekend, like drugs, or a dance party, which I was now finally at, stone-cold sober and having been accused of not having a sexy husband.
I soon began to lose my voice, shouting at T over the din. We decided to get another drink. I chose a kombucha. Try as we might, with only the lingering traces of Negroni and the herbal buzz of a high quality kombucha, we could not release the awareness of our human forms. The music was unrecognizable. “Not enough root chakra,” noted T, and I agreed. It seemed to be dance music for people who could press a button on their motherboard and bleep blorp their arms and legs in various robotic contortions. I had hoped to hear a track off the new Beyoncé album, maybe, or an old Beyoncé album, or really any Beyoncé album at all. But really it was just that it was past my bedtime, and I had flown too close to the sun, if the sun in this metaphor was liquid eyeliner and the inside of a former Masonic lodge.
I could keep writing about this night, I really could, but it is getting closer and closer to my bedtime and your bedtime. All of us need to get closer to the conclusion. OK? So: after a ceremonial performance by an individual playing a didgeridoo, in which we were instructed to sit on the floor, in which T and I were not sure we’d be able to get back up again, both us suffering from pins and needles in our legs, we were treated to a drag performance by my dance teacher, under the alias of Justin Beaver. Nervous that the dance class would be called on to provide support, I dragged T towards the back of the room, where we could just see the choreography. If I couldn’t leave my body, at least I could watch someone else be free with theirs, and we watched as they performed an erotic duet, complete with some light spanking with a wooden spoon, to the joyful, bouncing tones of the pop single “Sorry.” (Video is what my dancing will look like after a few more dance classes, lol).
Shortly after the Beaver performance, T and I caught a whiff of a fart so foul we tried to escape it, but could not. It permeated the un-aerated space, taking on an almost corporeal form, haunting us, taking up residence in our nostrils. We continued to step backwards, aghast, until we realized we were next to the door.
“I think that’s our sign,” I said to T, and she agreed, silently, her eyes watering with the smell. We burst out the doors and breathed in the refreshing scent of ten different brands of cigarette, mixing gloriously with the cold night air.
T texted me the next morning that she was sick. “It was the fart,” I wrote, because what else could it have been? We were not hung over; we hadn’t even stayed up that late, all things considered. But of course, it could have been anything, anyone. By Monday evening, I, too, felt ill. It wasn’t Covid, it didn’t seem to be the flu—it lacked that signature rapid-onset of symptoms that sets that particular virus apart. My back prickled in anticipation. A dry cough began. Soon, I was shivering with fever.
Two days later, Jimmy was stricken. I usually get everything; Jimmy usually stays strong, and it’s lucky that he does. The fact that he was down and out meant we were now outnumbered by our daughter, who seemed to be completely symptom-free over her week of Spring Break, running childcare-free circles around her ailing, working parents. All week I suffered, buried under the filthy fleece blanket favored by the dog, begging my child to watch TV.
As if things couldn’t get worse, Rosalind got sick Saturday, missed dance class, missed school Monday, missed school Tuesday, went Wednesday, got sent home with fever Thursday, and is still sick as I write this. It has been a long time since I’ve had to mutter to myself, under my breath: the day will end. The day will end. This day has to end.
It really was the worst possible outcome, besides early death, that I could have imagined—and I was livid with myself for going to the party. As Jimmy honked into the seventieth Kleenex of the day, I was livid, as Rosalind coughed herself awake, I was livid. As I logged in to teach my class over Zoom, I was livid. I was livid with myself and I was also embarrassed. How could I have possibly thought that party was a good idea?
How easy it is to look back with regret. Regret: that I was not more confident in my 20s, less self-conscious, more alive to the perfect suppleness of my young body. More alert to the possibilities around me. Regret: that I did not defend my husband’s honor, and ate a slice of pizza instead. Regret, so easy to linger in, because it’s simply some expired eyeshadow smeared on top of a real memory. Maybe the real regret was not just going for it, getting drunk, surrendering to the music and the company and the possibility that I didn’t belong, deciding to take a cab, and staying up all night.
OK, maybe not. But it’s easier to regret than imagine a future, one where my impending 40s are, perhaps, more fun than the decades that came before; that my body could do so much for me, still, with proper care and love, with orthotic inserts, with pizza and kombucha, with its newfound sphincter hands and sphincter feet.
Thanks for reading mom blog. ❤️Like❤️ this if you liked it… each heart gives me an immune system boost I do need to make it through the rest of this week. Comment below… were you at the party? Did you smell the fart? Have you tried to do something out of character lately? Was it a success? Or did you get sick and have to suffer for an entire week after?
I hope you sleep all night long,
Olivia
"I had been known to have fun a time or two in my life, hadn’t I? HADN’T I?" I ask myself this ALL THE TIME.
The entire first year of the pandemic I dreamed about dancing in sweaty clubs at 3am. Sadly, it was the pandemic that raged on and not me. Maybe I was just dreaming about my lost youth? I DID go to a midnight jazz performance recently and vow to do it again before I'm 50.