Tag: dance

Dirty Dancing Magic

Have you ever seen the film “Crazy, Stupid, Love”, with Ryan Gosling and Steve Carell (among other familiar faces)?  (If you haven’t, you can watch it on Netflix!)  ***If you don’t want anything ruined from the movie, do not read this next part.***  Remember the scene where Emma Stone’s character asks Ryan Gosling’s what his line is for getting girls to sleep with him?  So, he finally comes out with the fact that he does the “Dirty Dancing” lift.  She doesn’t believe him, but they do the lift anyway, and, of course, she totally falls for him at the end of the lift.

So, why is this relevant?

You see, I do acro-yoga – at least, I have re-started doing acro-yoga again, after a three-ish-year break.  The other night, at a sort of practice/hangout session (called a “jam”), one of the guys offered to test out a certain standing lift with me.  It was not the most basic option, so we agreed to do the simpler option first.  And what was that option?  The “Dirty Dancing” lift.

It definitely takes effort from both parties to make it work properly, so the “Crazy, Stupid, Love” version makes it look too simple.  “Dirty Dancing” is definitely closer to the kind of effort it actually would take a newbie flyer/follow to pull off the lift.  I’ve done lifts in dance routines before, and even a throw/toss, so I’m practiced in the concept of lifts, but I’ve never done that particular lift in a routine.  Anyway, so it took a few almosts, and then we had the lift down perfectly.

And it felt like flying… or something.  I’ve never actually flown (I think), so I can’t actually compare anything to flying, but it definitely felt magical and like I was more than just physically ‘above’ everything around me – I felt like I was on a higher plane of life.  And, of course, that I was utterly beautiful in this specific position, muscles flexed beautifully, like a fairy zooming overhead.

And this guy helped me to be in this position – it was because of him that I was in such a place of wonder and beauty…. I suddenly totally could get why girls would want to ravish the guy who did that lift with them.  Fortunately, I knew the guy and the general activity well enough to keep him and the actual task separate from one another in my head.  Otherwise, I would have been a total mess full of goo-goo eyes for him for weeks.  But I fully understood what could be so attractive, so sexy, so desirable about doing that lift.  I mean, how often do people normally put me into a place of magical wonder, and make me feel more beautiful than the whole world?  (Perhaps your life is different from mine, but I’ll let you know: It is extremely rare for me.)  😛

That being said, I have two things: 1) Totally try out acro-yoga, because it’s a blast and is totally easy, even if you aren’t super fit or anything.  2) I recommend giving the “Dirty Dancing” lift a try at some point in your life, guy or girl, because it is magical and awesome (as I have already mentioned multiple times).  🙂

Post-a-day 2018

Free, at last(?)

Tonight, a very good dancer told me, ‘I love watching you dance… you’re just so… free…’

It was an extreme compliment, coming from a very good dancer, but it also had me wonder why she selected the words she did, specifically “free”.

I’ve never had anyone come up with a reasonable descriptor for describing my dancing, but, the more I think about it, the more her words seem to make sense to me.

I don’t necessarily feel free when I am dancing…

However, I do dance with abandon and I let all rules and judgements just fall away from me, because they have no place in dancing for me (at least, not anymore, though they did for a little while, back in the day).

I don’t even give most concerns a thought, let alone my attention.

So, while I don’t necessarily experience being “free” while dancing, I suppose it can be seen as being similar to the concept of there being a “free from”, a “free of”, and a “free to” in life… different types of freedom to experience.

And my dancing freedom is not so much a ‘free to do as I please’ freedom, as it is a ‘free from constraints’ freedom.

Anyway… thoughts tonight…

Post-a-day 2018

High school crushes

It seems that I have a sort of high school crush.  That is to say, if I were in high school right now, I would have a total crush on this musical theatre guy.  For whatever reason, I noticed his photo and name in a program a few years ago, and have remembered him ever since, always recognizing his face and name, both in the program and actually up on the stage.  (I think I overheard some family members of his once, and so checked the program to see whom they were talking about doing so well in his musical theatre goals.  That sounds familiar.)

Anyway, it’s been so long and it has happened so gradually, I didn’t even notice when I started getting excited any time I saw him in a program.  Fast forward to tonight, and I was actually a bit giddy when I saw his picture and name.  I had a casual fan girl moment when he passed me as I walked to the bathroom during intermission. And it was not actual freak-out or anything – I merely smiled and considered how I would have freaked out and jumped up and down and all if I actually had been in high school, and if this were a real crush.

Nonetheless, I am delighted for this guy and his obviously progressing career in musical theatre – and his obviously progressing muscle mass – and it is exciting to recognize someone in all of these shows, even if I haven’t met him and I don’t actually know him.  Just his name and his talent…

Plus, it’s quite likely that he is gay, making it all the more like my old high school crushes – the best and most desireable guys always seemed to be gay back then.  (And I’m not so sure that that has changed much since then, actually…)

Post-a-day 2018

Out of nowhere

…I taught dance this weekend.  It was utterly ridiculous in circumstance – 11 girls at noon on a Saturday, in the middle of their celebrating a bachelorette party weekend, and in an airbnb house that kind of looks like a drug house from the outside.  I had met two of them at the rodeo, and I had offered to show them for free how to two-step (since they’re interns, and interns typically have minimal money), when they had asked where to learn it.  I genuinely began the lesson by asking with what level of intoxication I was dealing, and they loved it.  (Surprisingly, it was rather low, but they had just had a lazy start to the day, I guess, because mimosas were definitely happening.)  By the end of it all, I was clear that it wasn’t about how well they all danced, but that they loved what they were now doing, thanks to me.  And, to be fair, a good handful of them could actually two-step (and some even polka) decently as lead and follow by the end.  And they could identify the difference between a two-step and a polka.  Not bad for the middle of a bachelorette party weekend.  🙂

I really enjoyed it.

Post-a-day 2018

ukulele and hula

I started ukulele lessons today.  It also included a reunion and a brief lesson on Hawaiian, the language, which were both a fabulous bonus.

I’ve always had a sort of passive affinity for Hawaiian culture – that wonderful island life, about which I knew almost nothing.  I was almost afraid to go to Hawaiʻi, for fear of finding that the wonderful world I’d imagined was no longer in existence.  After living in Japan, even being in the countryside, I have learned the sort of balance that likely exists in the culture today.  It is like cowboys in Texas.  We have our big buildings and fancy cars and billboards, but you can still find, here and there, the true tradition.  Sometimes, it is only seen in ceremonies.  And sometimes it is part of someone’s everyday life.

My brother, though he rides and owns no horses, spends his days working on his land.  Physical labor in jeans and surrounded by grass, trees, and animals is his life most days.  And he grew up in the city.  There are plenty of others who grew up living his kind of life, and who still do the ranching on horseback.  Inside our city limits, no one would guess that that kind of life is just beyond our little area.  The average person wouldn’t even cross it knowingly, if he went driving outside the city, either.  You have to know how to find it.  And that’s just how Japan was… When I think of Hawaiʻi now, that’s how I imagine it must be to a certain degree.

Anyway, ukulele is fun.  I started it back in Japan, because I was lonely and didn’t have music in my life.  Plus, Hawaiian culture seemed to be prominent in Japan (the reasons for which I hadn’t understood at first), so ukulele seemed an appropriate way to bring music into my life while in Japan.  I even took a few hula lessons.  (Yes, they were awesome.)

Actually, what really spawned my desire to learn hula and ukulele – not just the casual interest with which I first bought the ukulele, but the real desire that got me into lessons for hula and then, finally, for ukulele now – was a film.  It was based in Hawaiʻi, and the caucasian daughter, maybe about 14 years old (I forget), did hula.  The way she moved her arms in the dance had me gazing, melting, it was just so beautiful to me.  Watching her dance, I had something happen within me.  I guess, because she was not Japanese or Hawaiian, but like me went through me head… I was able to see hula differently.  It was, at last, something that it was acceptable for me to do.

I had seen Japanese friends perform wonderfully, and plenty of other Japanese women I don’t even know, too.  But their close ties to Hawaiʻi made it okay for them to do it.  It was regular and standard for them to be doing hula.  But what – it isn’t “right”, but something like that, “reason” perhaps – reason does a German-heritage girl from Texas have for doing hula, without an extreme, intense love for it?

Maybe this is just my own brain that had me stuck in this thought process, but it just didn’t make enough sense to me to feel comfortable with pursuing hula.  It felt to me like visiting a religious building for a region to which one does not belong and about which one knows very little.  It isn’t that the person is not allowed.  Not at all.  It is just that the person can feel a little lost and uncertain when visiting, and so it can be difficult to visit in the first place, without having a sort of invitation.  That’s kind of how I felt about hula.

And that movie helped alter that for me.  I started attending hula classes whenever I could, and began somewhat seeking out a ukulele teacher.

Eventually, nude in a hot spring bath in the mountains, I found one.  And now, almost a year later, we finally are in the same country and with the same currency (that was the issue before), so we can do lessons.  We aren’t anywhere near one another, of course, because I’m in Texas and she’s in Hawaiʻi, but it’s going well so far.  Playing together is a bit weird, because of the lag, but I’ve worked with it for years with other things, so I’m somewhat accustomed to being slightly ahead of the beat and to hearing the clash of notes and timing, so that it sounds good on the other side.  All-in-all, it was fun, and I look forward to the next lesson next week.  😀

So, go listen to a ukulele song today, and think of me, yeah?  😉

P.S.  Icicles were crashing outside my window during our lesson today.  And this is Houston.  How cool is that?!  Or warming, I guess…

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Post-a-day 2018

‘How was your weekend?’

You know that feeling when things really don’t go the way you’d anticipated them going, – any of the many scenarios you’d imagined – yet they still worked out okay in the end?  I’m in the middle of it right now.

It’s such an odd feeling, really.  It isn’t that I hadn’t imagined it going anywhere from horribly to wonderfully.  I think it’s just that I’d expected more of a solid, clear result from this weekend’s events.  I thought that I’d know for certain how I felt about it by the end of it.  And yet, here I am, wondering how to describe it all.  Parts totally sucked, parts were totally blah, parts were good, and parts were wonderful.  It was all in there, I guess – practically every scenario I’d imagined had at least a little piece of itself presented during the weekend.  And that made for an overall okay weekend.  (I’m still secretly waiting for some kind of panic attack to ensue, or something ridiculous, it feels.)

I guess it was kind of like my diet has been recently, actually.

… and that brings me back to what I was sharing just the other day… no wonder my weekend went as it did, when my food and thoughts have been kind of like that recently, going all over the place, but averaging out to a reasonably contented middle ground, without being my desired stupendous.  Hm.

Post-a-day 2018

 

High School Fun in the Club

In high school, a friend convinced me to go to a Benny Benassi concert with a small group of friends.  It was the three guys and my best friend and I.  It was my first time going to a club with friends who weren’t dance friends, but just regular friends, and I think it was my first club concert experience, too.  Whatever the case, it was an exciting night for me, and for the others.

We had arranged for everyone to sleep at my house that night.  It wasn’t ideal, but it was our best option.  My best friend and I had to be up early for graduation the next morning (Yes, our own graduation), and the guys had to leave a few hours later, when my mom was heading out to come to our graduation.  So, the guys were getting more sleep than we were, but not too much more.  (Their graduation wasn’t until the Sunday morning.)

At the concert, we all had a great time.  It was my first experience of noticeable public smoking of marijuana, which was oddly neat, finally seeing that world, but in a safe environment, and where it wouldn’t affect me in any way.  But the best part of it all was the dancing.

Being trained in something is cool and all, but being able to be free from the training, and just do my own thing is always way fun.  It was a blast just dancing around without concern, surrounded by friends.  Okay, we did have a concern for space at times, but we were really good at getting people to spread away from us, so we had our space to dance comfortably.

In the later dancing, however, came the unforgettable part: My self-given challenge.  You see, my friend Victor had worn a sideways baseball cap, and that apparently was enough for me to devise myself a fun little challenge to get as much off of Victor as possible.  The key challenge was to do it without his noticing.

I think the others each found out about my challenge at some point or other – heck, I think the idea partly sprang from their suggesting I try to steal his belt.  (We were not being sexual about it at all – it was totally surface level fun… just so we’re clear.)  And so, we all knew, and Victor had no idea that anything was up.

After a great time of dancing and cheering and whatnot together, we all were ready to head home.  Walking in the parking lot, after exiting the club, not one of us comments on what I am wearing.  Victor, however, looking down at himself, practically exclaims suddenly, “Woah!  Why does my shirt only have two buttons closed?!”

We all keep our silence as we struggle not to burst with laughter.  After what felt like forever, but likely was only a second or three,  Victor figures it out.  (I think it was a combination of our telling him and his realizing bits on his own.)  in addition to my own clothing, I am wearing Victor’s hat and belt.  And I was so close on the button-down he was wearing – there were a million buttons on it, and I had all but two undone.  I believe I also had his wallet, and possibly his car keys.  And he had no idea about any of it.

For whatever reason, I was proud of my accomplishments.  Being stealthy took skill, and I was proud to have had it in abundance that night.

Yeah, that was a good time.  🙂

Post-a-day 2017

Love Notes for the World

My mom sent me an e-mail today that reminded me of one of my fun activities in college: my (love) sign.

You see, when I was in high school, I was doing partner dancing.  A guy in the dance community in Houston died at some point, and it caused people to reminisce often.  I’m not sure if I ever met the guy, because he died shortly after I began going out dancing (as opposed to just dancing at the studio and in classes), but there’s a chance our paths crossed a handful of times.  Nonetheless, I have always remembered this guy.  My friend’s dad was talking about this guy, and talked about “his signs”.  I inquired, and discovered that this guy would carry around signs – I think they were poster boards, actually – with various messages, and would use them when at the club for dance socials.  The specific example I remember was how, if two people were really flirting or kissing, he might hold up a sign that read, “Get a room.”  As this is by no means a social norm, the idea always stuck with me.

In college, for some reason, this memory arose right at the time my flatmate was in an art class and had extra art paper at home one night.  It’s the really thick, soft paper that is similar to poster board, but is used specifically for drawing or painting (or possibly both).  So, that night, I had a torn-off section of this art paper, and I decided to make my own sign.  On one side, it read, “you should, too”.  The other read, “I love you”.

I carried this poster around with me almost everywhere for the remainder of that semester.  I think I even had it while I rode my bike (actually, yes, I do remember riding my bike as I held on to it).  It was incredibly odd, but completely accepted by my college.  I was really nervous about it at first, but very quickly became comfortable with carrying around the sign.  I mean, come on… kids do all sorts of odd things in college, so this was just one more in a million odd things we would cross.

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Anyway, I loved it.  I miss it at times, even.  I don’t exactly live the same sort of lifestyle now as I did in college, however, I think I could work out something.  The thing my mom sent me was about business cards that read simply “YOU MATTER”.  And I think I want to make some more of my own things, but following this fashion of a small card that can be given to others.

When I lived in Vienna, a friend found a stash of the ‘Our Daily Bread’ cards, which is a sort of deck of little cards, where each is shaped like a bread basket and has a bible verse on it (these had German on one side and French on the other).  We handed them out to people at the train station late at night, while another friend would do his regular harp serenading for the late-night folks waiting at the station. (Yes, that is a whole other story.)

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So, I guess, my point is that I am now planning to combine these three ideas.  I don’t know exactly what I’ll put on my cards yet, but I know that I want to do them.  I can start this week, and see what comes up, see how I like them, and see what to change for the better.

 

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What I wrote with this one on Facebook, back when I originally posted it:

A girl in the WG found a bunch of little cards with Bible verses on them. One side was in German and the other side was French. I think they were made in Belgium. No one really knows whence they came, but the girl decided to start giving them out to people, specifically in the subway station when David, the harpist, would play late at nights. I am now hooked, and want always to have some on hand, that I can give out to people as food for thought – you never know what people have going on, and thus never know what might make a difference in someone’s life. So don’t let anything stop you from sharing your love and care for others. Rather, find a way to have those things that are holding you back actually Help you to accomplish that which you wish

 

Post-a-day 2017

The article my mom sent to me today