Why I Dance No Matter What My Body Looks Like

A former co-worker told me tall, lanky people shouldn’t dance. He was wrong.

I was sitting across from a former co-worker one evening when he looked me in the eye and told the truth: “I don’t think tall, lanky people should dance.” Why? Is it because we look like the inflatable air dancer at the used car dealership, jerking way up high in the wind as we advertise a bad deal?

He was talking about himself, but I sensed an invitation in his words to share his body shame. I’m very tall and very lanky. You could call me gangly or even beanpole, like some of my junior high classmates, but I prefer “willowy.” Or even “statuesque.” A good euphemism never hurt anyone permanently.

I politely disagreed with my co-worker’s assessment and then thought back to the joy dancing has brought me over the years and what I would have lost if I shared his tragic opinion.

My love of shaking tail feathers began at high school dances. I occupied a safe middle space in the social strata — I played some sports (none that required height; I loved running) and knew how to laugh my head off at nothing, two traits that will earn you love from immature people. I anticipated dances with glee and participated fully. I jumped, twirled, shimmied with abandon to both Lynyrd Skynyrd and Dr. Dre. I was gangsta rap’s whitest ambassador, but this is not a role for which you apply; it is a role for which you dance. Besides, if you wanted to make fun of me, you had to get near me, and that was difficult because I moved fast.

There were the organized dances, like homecoming, and the post-Friday-night-game dances. I attended as many as I could even after the infamous Valentine’s Day Burn, where a boy I was dating stopped by a dance to hand me a bag with half a rice Krispies treat inside and then left to have sex with my friend on the track team. I didn’t hold it against the dance for being the scene of the crime. It wasn’t the dance’s fault. Besides, you can’t lament the loss of a man whose best talent was lying on the floor and sticking out his stomach until he looked pregnant.

After I graduated from high school, my love affair continued in college at parties and in dorm rooms and in courtyards and wherever else I could find people moving in some rhythmic fashion to a tune. I snagged a cute boyfriend who played the guitar, and then I didn’t even need a radio or a DJ or a band. We danced in his apartment before going to the bar and then we went to the bar and danced there and then we left and danced at a friend’s apartment who had a taxidermy raccoon. The raccoon was frozen in a pose with his arm in the air, waving like he just didn’t care.

The float trip down a muddy river somewhere around Missouri or Southern Illinois afforded multiple opportunities to get filthy dancing both on and off the water. When we reached our campground at the end of a good day’s float, who should be at the site but a band! Reader, we danced.

I danced the Macarena at weddings and slow-danced in the Purple Rain. I climbed a Stairway to Heaven and decided I would not be a Barbie girl, in her Barbie world, no not ever. I wouldn’t be stiff, holding my arm at a 90-degree angle with my feet permanently frozen on my tiptoes formed for high heels I never wear. I would be loose and liquid, I would be lanky and gawky, I would bend and jump and slide, to the Electric Slide, its electric!

I was sad for a second when I left Los Angeles for New York until I found a crew who wanted to dance and then we murdered the dive bar juke boxes and stormed the streets and sang in the subways, all while dancing. Did you see that strange woman with the headphones on skipping around the Brooklyn Heights promenade in the dusk last year as if she were high? That was me. I wasn’t high. I just wanted to dance in the shadow of the city lights on a little strip of paradise with my arms thrown wide on a night I was alive.

I danced through good times and bad. I danced after a divorce, and I danced when I had no damn job and I was so broke and when I didn’t know what else to do but dance.

I will be straightforward: my body may look OK, or very stupid when I dance. I may look like Elaine, jerking her leg out from the side at a painful angle, or I may look like I’m simply too excited, like a puppy dribbling urine on the rug as you pet its belly. One must maintain a look of cool indifference on one’s face to really get the dance right. I have a feeling, a sneaking suspicion, that I do not look cool or indifferent. I do not believe my eyebrows arch wryly while my hips swivel at just the right moments. I’m pretty sure I throw my hands above my head and jump a little, but looking cool isn’t the point of dancing.

Sometimes we feel so alive we can’t sit still when the rhythm is pulsing and the day is still awake and something inside of ourselves needs to be expressed when words won’t do. Dancing is my wild rebellion in a world that often feels heavy and dark.

I’m not the only one who moves in both joy and defiance, when circumstances say I should sit down. I listened to a podcast years ago of a woman who discovered her apartment came with a bird’s-eye view of her neighbors’ bedroom. She tried not to spy on the young couple, but the magnetic pull of such a temptation was too much to resist because she was human — so she sat on a couch and watched the lovers’ lives pass as if she were watching television. She felt guilty, but she couldn’t stop.

They were young and beautiful and full of life, but then one day, things changed. The young man became thinner and he lost his hair and then he died as the young woman lay beside him on their bed. She changed too; she gained weight and looked as though she had aged a decade and her movements became slow and ponderous in her grief.

Time passed. The drapes were closed. And then, one night, the spy looked into the young woman’s bedroom and she saw her dancing. This woman who had lost her partner, presumably to cancer, was moving around the room, shaking it to an unheard tune. She lost her love, but life moved on and she was moving with it.

We dance to let go, to lose ourselves, to find ourselves, to enjoy the moment or escape from it. We dance because music demands it and life isn’t the same without it. We don’t dance because we look good in the eyes of others; we dance despite their eyes and what they think because it’s not about them. We dance because we can.

I had a dream one night that everyone was dancing in the moonlight. It was such a fine and natural sight. You can’t dance and stay uptight; it’s a supernatural delight. Everyone should dance in the moonlight.