I was always an unusual girl. When I was a kid, I had braces and wore glasses, and my Mom cut my hair. Most days I would lay in bed with my 14-foot tall teddy bear, and ask God, “God, why was I born a loser?” But when I got a little bit older, I learned how to have fun on my own. I would close my bedroom door and twerk for hours with wild abandon. I loved to twerk. One day my mother walked in on me twerking. I was so embarrassed. And yet I continued to twerk.

One unrelated story I would like to tell you is about when I was a child, barely old enough to use the bathroom by myself. When I did learn how to use the bathroom by myself, it just made me even more independent. One day I was using the bathroom in the daytime. It was only my mother and I in the house at the time, my father had left long ago, and I had ran out of toilet paper. I couldn’t ask my mother for an extra role because she was watching Another World. It was her most favorite show, and I didn’t want to ruin it. As I stood in the hallway, I suddenly hatched the idea that I could move the furniture in the forbidden living room, twerk on the pink carpeting underneath, and move the furniture back overtop. A year to the day later when my mother rearranged the furniture in the forbidden living room, I was devastated that she just assumed that I did it without any possible consideration for other people in spite of the fact that I wasn’t even allowed in that room!

One night years later I was laying on the couch and my mother told me, “It’s Friday night. You should be out twerking with the other children!” When my mother fell asleep, I would sneak out of the house and go to wild twerking parties in the city. The best twerking was to be found on the West Side. Sometimes the cops would come and they would tell us, “Hey! There’s no twerking here!,” and I would stick my tongue out at them. The subways were dirty and wild, and there was twerking everywhere. We found love in the downtown twerk collective. Everywhere we went we were twerking, and when we were twerking we were truly free.

The media noticed us, and we went on the talk show. Perhaps the show was called Donahue. The host was particularly fascinated that club promoters paid us money to twerk, fascinated that our love had value. The host called us the future of America, in perhaps a judgemental tone. After a commercial break, the host brought out my mother, who loved to watch us twerk. She hated that I told the carpet story. The audience watched us twerk and talk about why we twerk. They called us whores and we stuck our tongues out at them and twerked.

I later went to SVA. All my friends did. That was just what you do.

Much has been said about Miley chopping and screwing and putting that man into a television box from J&R Music and Computer World and throwing the box into the Hudson River since the movie came out. All I will say about that is that we were never really the same after Miley went to prison. And the rest is history. The city council passed a law saying that we needed to carry a license to twerk in public, and they simply refused to give us a license.

When I return to the West Side to twerk as an adult, I see condos and banks. The World Trade Center is gone, and so are so many of my friends. All I have now are condos and banks. I stick my tongue out at them.