Like Nobody's Watching

I don't dance.

I just don't do it. I'm not good at dancing, I don't look good doing it, and did I mention that I'm really really bad at it? When I dance, I'm so white it's blinding. I've permanently destroyed the retinas of several otherwise innocent victims, just by dancing in their view. So yeah. I don't dance.

Anyway, that said: let's set the stage. Saturday night, Coconino Center for the Arts, and the Fishtank Ensemble are rocking the place with some dance-alicious vibes the Center hasn't seen since the last Boulder Acoustic show. Fishtank's music is fun, upbeat, different, funky and demands that you move in some way. Even for a white boy like me, I had to move a little to their beats. I bobbed my head around and stuff. Fortunately, no one died.

Given the audience in attendance, the heads bobbin', and some of the folks I knew in attendance that wanted to dance, I expected half of the audience to move into open spaces on the stage and dance. But no one did.

Well, I found this curious. But my good pal, Kim Seiferth, found this downright distasteful and was on a mission to fix it. So she says to me that we need to go down there, on the stage where everybody can see us, and start the dancing. My perfect response: "huh?" She says that we need to get all dramatic, each of us walk down the two flights of stairs to the stage level, simultaneously, and do a quick synchronized dance that will get everyone on their feet and dancing.

To which I responded further and with deeper insight: "say what?"

I put up some very heavy resistance to this idea, enough that Kim went away and I was relieved. Then, a song or two later, Joe Cornett says to me, "That girl is looking for you. She wants you to dance." Oh god, I think, she's not backing off. And I know enough about Kim - her being spunky and uppity and fun and all - that she was not going to let this idea go. So, despite my efforts to hide somewhere that she'd never find me again, she found me and pushed. And pushed and pushed, until I insisted that we add two more people to our plan. (This was my way of stalling so it wouldn't happen, but stalling is all it accomplished.)

Kim, Joe, myself and Diane Immethun all went into the lobby and hatched our plan. Here's how it played out.

Kim and I at the top of one flight of stairs, Joe and Diane at the top of the other flight. We walk down at the same time, get to the bottom and on stage, turn towards each other and have a moment of stare-down. Everyone can see us now. The band is in the middle, playing their song, we are staring at each other at opposite ends of them. So dramatic.

We walk, in tandem, towards one another, all dance-styled. Staring each other down, we circle each other, and play it up for the audience. We are doing this, by the way, right in front of the band. We have stolen their thunder, whether it was appropriate or rude I don't know, but now everyone is cheering us on. The band's singer, Ursula, told us later that she forgot her cue to start singing while we did our theatrics, because, well, we were doing our theatrics.

In a word, we shocked the band. After circling each other twice, we dancers each went into the corners of the stage - I waved at the audience to come down and join us - and began dancing to the tunes. Within seconds, dozens of people were littering the stage and dancing the rest of the night away. Feet stompin', elbows flyin', bodies twirlin'. It was a poetic, flat-out undeniable moment of awesomeness.

So I danced. In front of everyone, with a few dozen people dancing along with me. On the stage in the corners, we were somewhat in the dark, but there was enough glow that everyone could see us dancing. For three songs, until the band finished their set before they came back from a raucous standing ovation demanding an encore, I stayed and danced. And let's repeat: I'm not good at this dancing thing. I probably stunk up the joint and made everyone around me look like dancing all-stars. But I didn't care. I was having fun. I was happy that our scheme worked, that we got people out of their seats and dancing to this amazing show, and created a moment that I know we won't soon forget. And the music was infectious and made me want to move. Did I make a fool of myself? Yup. Did my teenage son, among others, look on and think "Wow, he is one god. awful. dancer. and crap, now I'm blind"? Probably.

Did I care? Nope.

Cheers,
JT