AUSTIN, TX - From what I've seen so far, I reckon I'm the only one on the magazine staff who thought the "Let's Dance" theme had to do with the horizontal rhumba.
It just seemed like the natural connection, folks, considering that just about every kind of dancing is reminiscent of, or a prelude to, the act of coitus.
There are exceptions, of course. You have your high-brow ballets, those tapes of Richard Simmons' crowd "Dancing to the Oldies," and --- oh yeah! ---clogging. There ain't nothing sexy about clogging. Fact is, now that I think about it, it makes me worry for the soul of this country that 20 MILLION PEOPLE are willing to ADMIT that they paid good money to get the video of "River Dance." It's scarey.
Me, I'm thinking Denny Terrio, "Dirty Dancing," "Saturday Night Fever," Fred and Ginger, here. I'm thinking about slow dancing with the lights out at some house parties, and how a dance is the way to sizing someone up as a potential sexual partner.
As Debbie Harry sang when she was with "Blondie," the invisible dance.
Okay. So I'm going for the obvious. Sue me.
Let's level with each other here, Pilgrims: Haven't there been times when what got your juices flowing and sparked your interest up in somebody was just watching them dance?
I know I have to say a mighty "Amen" to that.
It's the Salome Syndrome all over again. Shake those seven veils, Temptress. I never liked that wilderness-crying fool no way.
The public act, or art, of dancing goes back at least to our human village fertility dances, as far as This Writer can ascertain. That would imply to me that we humans have always correlated the verticle, public dancing withthe horizontal, invisible dance.
We all know that the best sex commences to happen when both parties drop down into unison with the universal rhythm. So when the music manages to speak to the soul, the body just naturally responds from its center of gravity. After the feet start to tap, the hips just naturally begin to sway. And if you can go with the rhythm, you just naturally have to dance.
We all assume, too, that a person who is a good dancer is also good in bed. From my own personal research on the subject, nine times out of ten this assumption is true. Then you have your Michael Jackson's exemplifying the exception. I don't even want to visualize it.
Instead, I want you to visualize this, Gentle Reader:
From the moment that first inspired fool tapped his hand on a skin, stretch out over a gourd, in Ethiopia, or the Tigris-and-Euphrates, or wherever-the-hell-the-Divine-Spark-struck, and beat out a rhythm, and that first lady started shaking her buns before the rising fire, SOMETHING NEW WAS BORN IN THE WORLD!
We had DANCE.
We had a NEW WAY of expressing the unexpressible.
We COMMUNICATED, non-verbally, in an all new way that was essential, and which we could never abandon.
Don't let anyone --- ANYONE --- tell you that there is no newness in the world, because Dance laughs in their faces and shows them how wrong they are about human vitality.
We are discoverers.
But if, tonight or any other night, I walk up to you and say, "Let's Dance," expect I'm thinking: bumping uglies.
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LONDON CALLING!: FLISS USSHER on the transcendence of the dance.
TRIO: THOMAS HART's take on "The Invisible Dance."
PLANETARY MADNESS: JENNIFER BLUE's weekly forecast on your sign.
ON DRUGS: ADAM J. SMITH looks at "Bad Raids" in good neighborhoods.
POWERSBOOKS: BOB POWERS interviews "River Angel" author A. Manette Ansay, who seems to be "Dancing Toward Stardom."
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