exciting, informative, snarky, and very likely fabricated tales of life as an american expat in london

i bet that you look good on the dance floor

by Jen at 8:26 pm on 21.07.2007 | 2 Comments
filed under: classic, mutterings and musings

last night i went to the lovely nicole’s birthday drinks over at south london pacific, and after a few umbrella drinks towards the end of the evening, a few classic motown songs came on. motown has had a special place in my heart since i was 12 and spent a whole year indoctrinating myself with aretha, marvin, diana and all the classics. and they’re fun as hell to dance to.

i was a real late bloomer when it came to dancing, far too self-conscious thinking that people were watching me, believing i had to do it “right”, and coming across awkward and stilted as a result. i was one of those kids who could never learn to moonwalk or do the cabbage patch, no matter how much i practiced in the privacy of my bedroom. i was convinced that i just had no rhythm, thanks to a steady diet of folk music and talk radio from my parents. they had no rhythm, so it made sense that i had none either. other kids loved school dances – i counted myself lucky that i managed to avoid almost all of them.

but it was motown that finally taught me to love dancing. when all the other kids my age were obsessed with duran duran, i was listening to smokey robinson and the miracles, and diana ross and the supremes. the temptations, gladys knight and the pips, stevie wonder, martha and the vandellas, the four tops… i could sing all their songs by heart. and somewhere in there, i found i liked dancing to them. to my surprise, i discovered that, in spite of my obvious genetic disadvantage, i *could* follow a beat and move my feet in time to the music.

the only problem was, they weren’t exactly playing motown to kids wearing legwarmers and madonna-inspired bracelets, and i was still painfully shy. thus for many years, my dancing prowess was never seen outside the confines of the bedroom i shared with my sister. i made it through the embarassment of junior and senior proms only because the guys i went with were even more self-conscious dancers than i was.

all that changed, however, when i married a guy who loved dancing. his family was full of music and he liked to say he grew up falling asleep behind the speakers in the discos. and he was a good dancer – the kind of guy who catches your eye on the dance floor with his confidence and smooth moves. the kind of guy whose greatest skill comes from effortlessly making his partner look good. if there was music, he was dancing – and he wanted me to dance with him.

time and again, over my reluctant protest, he’d drag me out onto the floor. and i’m not sure when it happened, but at a certain point, his confidence became contagious. i looked around one day and suddenly realised that no one was watching how i danced, or comparing skills, because they were all too busy having *fun*. some of them weren’t even very good, but they were having a much better time than i was. i stopped caring about what other people thought, and began to enjoy myself. and as i learned to relax, i became a better dancer. i learned to wind and grind, drop my waist and shake my hips, work my way down to the floor and back up again. i even learned to hustle, twirl and dip. i learned to enjoy dancing with strangers, both pursuing and being pursued. i learned to enjoy dance as flirtation – all sweaty closeness, sexual innuendo and bass beats.

i haven’t been dancing in a while – the clubs are full of shitty techno kids on drugs, and standing in a queue being evaluated by bouncers is not my idea of a good time. j’s not a dancer and pretty much refuses to dance in public unless it involves crowd surfing and a mosh pit. the last time i went dancing, strangely enough, was in a restaurant in la paz, bolivia.

so when one of my favourite all-time motown songs came on last night, and i jumped up and ran to the dance floor, it made me realise just how much i miss it. i’ve gone from dreading it to loving it to bemoaning its absence in my life. who would have believed it? not the geeky girl hanging out in her bedroom trying to moonwalk for most of 1984, that’s for sure.

fontella bass – rescue me

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

2 Comments »

2 Comments

  • 1

    Comment by Nicole

    22.07.2007 @ 11:59 am

    One of my old jokes is I can only dance if I pretend I am a gay man. . .

  • 2

    Comment by Jen

    22.07.2007 @ 12:58 pm

    nah, i saw you – you can dance! )

RSS feed for comments on this post