Dosado With Your Partner

Saturday night I went to the Annual Open End Barn Dance, which, if you don't already know, is only one of the best times to be had in Chicago...at least I'd remembered it being a good time last year, but when I showed up with my friends last night, sober and cold, to a big loft that wasn't anywhere near as crowded as last year and an empty stage with no band in sight, I suddenly wished I'd stayed at home and watched season 1 of The Office on DVD again.

Even an hour later when the spaced had filled considerably, the band started playing, and people got to square dancing, I was still regretting my decision to come along. While I had a blast last year --much to my surprise--at the annual open end barn dance, I'd seemed to have forgotten in the last 12 months how much touching is involved in square dancing. Touching other people--people you don't know--and having them touch you, too...over and over and over again. There's also a lot of bouncing. And swinging. And then more touching. Sometimes people even hug.

This was a mistake, I thought to myself as I turned down some strange man's request to dance, tipping my can of PBR (all you can drink for $15) and telling him I had to finish my beer first before I ran to the corner to hide.

But then something happened to me--around about the 3rd dance of the night, I got caught up in the contageous good time of it all...the swinging and bouncing and even the touching, the rhythmic calls and steps and claps, the drunken smiles and instant friendships, the comraderie in looking like asses together--a room full of grown adults searching for some warmth from bitter cold and a few hours break from the insanity of modern life, and by the end of the night, after sweating and laughing and drinking tap water from some strange girl's empty beer cup in the bathroom while in line for the toilets, I was really, really glad I'd come.

"We don't get enough of this," said my new friend Jeff, whom I'd been partnered with on my first dance, as he smoked a cigarette and I cooled down in the night time winter air, my cheeks flushed and my heart still pounding after a rigorous set of promenades and swirls.

"What?" I asked, "Exercise?"

"That, too," he replied, "But I mean this kind interaction--connecting with other people you don't get a chance to meet in your regular life, and just having fun and learning something new together."

"I know," I said, "And everyone's so happy when they're square dancing. And not even in an ironic way."

"Yeah, and it's just better than a bar," he said, "where you don't really have any reason to talk with other people unless you're trying to pick them up."

Then we decided to start a band with our other new friend, Joe--I'm going to play the tamborine and sing back-up, and we're going to call ourselves the Square Trio.

Remember how lame square dancing was in jr. high gym class? How awkward and humiliating and nerve-wracking? Well, I'm convinced--had there been kegs of beer stretegically placed around the gym and communal flasks of whiskey passed during all the dosados, we would have been much more well-adjusted teen-agers, and perhaps even less pretentious adults. We certainly would have been less square. So to speak.

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  Incase you're dying for an update on my hair (and who isn't?), here's a picture the night of the barn dance before I left my place. The hair's growing slowly but surely and now must be pinned to my head at all times less it poof out like a big mushroom cap. (My goal is the hair in my current profile picture, which was taken just weeks before the ill-fated mullet).

And yes, it has occured to me how narcississtic it is to post pictures of my hair progress like anyone should care, so I'd like this to be a sort of public service announcement, rather than just gratuitious picture-posting. Consider all my self-photos a warning against free student haircuts. And also too much gin. And sometimes over-tweazing.