About that interpretive dance

Do you remember the part where I said I was going to have to work on keeping a straight face while doing an interpretive dance about the letter 'C"? (See "Big Fucking Waste of Time" for the reference.)

Two things:

For starters, neither I nor the four other lovely women doing the interpretive dance with me managed to keep a straight face during this little episode of our lives. Juliana started giggling. Aliso, who was my dance partner, passed me several times with the most outrageous smirk on her face. Bubba, dear Bubba, just made the grin part of her act.

At one point, we were a tangled mess -- the part of the dance we called "oozing and knotting, knotting and oozing" -- and I actually had to say to at least one my fellow dancers, Let's hold it together. This will be over. Of course, then I added, Not soon enough and she broke out in giggles.

UCM interrupts herself: Here I must take a minute to note that I was momentarily drawn away from my keyboard by the sounds of creole-like percussion out on the street, drawing closer and closer. Brogan and I went to the window to see what was the matter. Let me ask you: What's better than seeing Santa and his reindeer on the lawn when you hear such a clatter? I'm sure you all have lots of answers, but I'll tell you: Five brown-skinned women with fabulous bodies, walking down the middle of the street in high heels and very scanty bikinis, wearing large Carnival headdresses and being trailed by a rag-tag bunch of percussionists. That's what. I love living on this street. Because even if I stay single for quite some time, there's always SOMETHING to look at out my window. And *this* was hummanah-hummanah!

Now we return to our regularly scheduled program, already in progress.

What was I talking about? ... Oh. So, the SECOND thing that was notable about our interpretive dance of the letter 'C' was ... it wasn't even the fucking LETTER 'C'! What we *thought* was a 'C' turned out to be a bit of scrolling in a considerably more ornate 'F' or something. Seeing as how a significant part of the dance was aimed at making a 'C' on the floor, this was a little appalling to learn. Coming after the fact, like it did.

So, you might wonder -- or you might really hope that I won't go into the detail -- of just what this interpretive dance looked like. Briefly: Five women twisting their bodies together closely (the "oozing" part) and intertwining our hands in the air (the "knotting" part). From that spinning mass of feminine yumminess (*my* story here!), two would break out, bow aristocratically at each other and begin a sensual courting dance that lead them in opposite directions in a nearly closed circle (the infamous 'C') . (This was my contribution to the choreography.) When they came face to face again, they would bow again and head off in the reverse direction, spinning and twirling and looking all giddy-in-love-school-girl like until they completed the 'C' a second time and returned to the oozing and knotting feminine yumminess. While the two women were doing this, the other three broke free from their intwinement and danced in a circle within the circle, acting out some kind of "village labor," such as sweeping or hoeing or washing or sewing.

This business continued for three minutes, fifty seconds. It was one of the silliest things I've done in sometime. I'm not sure what to make of our classmate's comments, which were highly complimentary. They called our dance "fluid" and "graceful."

I've got to say, this is the SECOND TIME in one week that someone has called my dancing -- or dancing that I've been involved with -- "graceful." In my estimation, I've never had a single ounce of physical grace. I feel lumbering and goofy, and I don't have good shoes for dancing. But I'm thinking: If I've heard it twice, does that mean there's something to it? If I hear it again, perhaps that will constitute some nascent form of "evidence."

However, our classmates also talked about the "symbolism" and the "meaning" in our dance. This is amusing because everyone in my group kept shrugging and saying, "Shit, this sucks" and "We have no fucking clue what we're doing, do we?" and "This is sooooo meaningless." One of the women in the group said during the class discussion later, "I got *nothing* out of this. It meant nothing to me. There was no character to connect with, nothing to embody."

I told the teacher, Perhaps one of the reasons we found this so void of meaning, personally, is that your framing this as a 'letter' in the first place narrowed our sense of what we could make from it. I had to just tell myself, 'I'm the letter 'C' and this is some funky kind of Sesame Street.' (That's when we found out it wasn't the letter 'C' after all.

Anyway, I was being nice, right? Because what I didn't add was, And also, your choice of music sucked. There was no beat to it, man. We all were thinking there in the warm-ups, *WHY* didn't someone bring a bong to class today? Because getting loaded is really the only way we are going to tap into *anything* here. Of course, if we *had* gotten loaded, we might have all started enjoying that "oozing and knotting" a little too much and fell into a little reverie of sorts right there on the floor.

(Like I said, it's *my* story. I can tell it the way I want.)

Everything written herein is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge and abilities. I do believe, however, that it will quickly become a repressed memory. So if you happen to see me and ask me to show you my part of the dance and I don't seem to know what you're talking about, please let sleeping dogs lie.