An interesting thing happened at the company Christmas party this year. I danced with a half dozen lovely ladies, all decked out in their holiday gowns. That’s not particularly noteworthy; I’ve danced with women in holiday gowns before. It might have been interesting if I had been decked out in a holiday gown, but that was not the case and, moreover, digresses from the point.
What was striking to me was the realization that each of my partners had one favorite dance step that carried her through the entire night. One step. One of my companions held out both hands, like a kid waiting to be spanked with a teacher’s ruler, and then made little hand-circles, first clockwise and then counter clockwise. Initially, I thought, “Gee, that’s kinda cute,” but by the end of “Louie, Louie,” I was considerably bored with the Eddie Cantor gesture. So I danced with another partner.
“Ah ha,” I said to myself, “I can see by your demeanor that you have rhythm.”
And she did. Her right shoulder dipped to the off-beat and then rolled back on the on-beat. At the same time, her left knee buckled in and then out again. It looked real spiffy. But 16 measures into the song, 32 measures into the song, I was wondering when I might see another step: maybe a dip with the left shoulder and a buckle with the right knee—that would be a novelty. But no, 128 measures of dip right, buckle left.
I began to develop a theory. I hypothesized that sometime in junior high school each of my daring partners discovered a step that worked, a step that was conventional and efficient—but primarily a step that did not attract attention. When that movement was conceived, they latched on to it with a vengeance.
At that moment, each of these self-conscious teenagers experienced DANCE BRAIN DAMAGE. The circuits in their heads that control dance creativity blew up, and now that portion of cerebral hardware is a glob of mangled wire-endings and burnt PVC. With that, all dance learning stopped. You could hear the soft, melancholic refrain of taps playing in the distance: Ta-ta-taaa. Ta-ta-taaa. What if my theory is correct? Moreover, what if the same thing happens in all sectors of our lives?
Maybe we have eating brain damage: “I’m sorry. I only know how to eat pudding. My brain blew up before I was introduced to vegetables.”
Or people brain damage: “I can’t speak to you; I only talk to people who resemble my mother—brain damage, you know.”
Is it possible we grab on to one thing that works and stick with it forever and ever, until death takes us home and we do the same thing in heaven?
How boring.
It is time to connect the wires, to clean out the caked PVC, to accept a new opportunity for growth. Sure, making little circles left and right works, but so do jabs and undulations and twirls and hip thrusts and, Willy Begonia, THE POSSIBILITIES ARE MIND-BOGGLING!
It is time to break out. It is time to ask ourselves some industrial-strength questions. If we did not have brain damage, how would our lives be different? How would our self-images be altered? What new career paths would we take? How would our relationships change? What new challenges would we accept? Ideally, life should be a process of routinely recreating ourselves—of continually asking, “What can I do today to learn, to experience, to expand the paradigm of my world?”
For just once, I would like to have seen one courageous, brain-healthy dancer doing the alligator: flip-flopping on all fours, flamboozling the whole crowd. Sure, it’s risky. And, yeah, it’s different. But it sure ain’t boring.
