Dancing With Myse-elf

I have a funny, slightly (make that really) embarrassing story to tell.

I went into our guest/shove-everything-in-there room to fold laundry this afternoon.  The reason I did it in there today is because,...well,... before our Easter company came on Sunday, the clean laundry got,...well,...shoved in there.  That's what the room is for, right?

Since the laundry mountain was in the guest/shove-everything-in-there room and since we aren't one of those newfangled families with a portable DVD player or even a functional laptop, I couldn't do my traditional bonnet movie viewing while I tackled the clothes pile.  So I grabbed my MP3 player with all the 70s, 80s, and 90s music that Joe had loaded on it.

It was awesome.  I was really getting into it.  Folding clothes, dancing, singing at the top of my lungs.

So I get to the song, Dancing With Myself (I guess it's the Blink-182 version) and I totally went nuts.  It was just really cool to be all alone, in a room all by myself, totally letting loose.

I had scattered all the various laundry baskets and piles around the floor as I folded and sorted things like towels, underwear, socks, pillow cases.  There were several directly in front of the door, in order to deter any little people who may think they needed their Mama.  Dad was in charge.  (He can handle anything!)

Oh, yeah, my story.  I was dancing with myself to Dancing With Myself.  As I said, I was totally grooving on it.  Picture if you dare, a somewhat overweight 40-something going nuts to this 1980s punk number.  Never mind.  Please don't try to picture that.

I was remembering a certain party some friends and I stumbled upon one Halloween in Madison.  Perhaps in this context stumbled is a poor choice of words, since I'm quite sure we were all in full control of our faculties.  I mean "stumbled" in the sense of wandering around a college town on a holiday weekend and somebody we were talking to mentioned a party at such-and-such a house. As it turned out, this particular party was a punk dance thing.  It remains to this day my one and only experience with the whole slam dancing thing.  Is it called a mosh pit?  I don't even know if that's the correct term.  Were you along that time, Joe?  Was that a mosh pit?

Whatever you want to call it, it was a very strange experience, with bodies so close together the participants were merely propelled around the dance floor.  My friend, Lisa, was knocked to the floor at one point.  She might have been afraid of being trampled. But what she remembers instead is falling over, seeing at close range the base of the lead singer's microphone for a brief moment, being lifted back to her feet, and propelled once again into the swirling flow of jostling bodies.  Strange days indeed.

To return to the present, I was in my guest/shove-everything-in-there room folding my clothes.  I was listening to oldish dance tunes.  I was really in the zone, dancing to that particular number, remembering the strange dance experience.

To be somewhat discreet let's say I wasn't swinging my arms much, since they were busy with clothes.   But I was definitely swinging.  I turn to put something into a pile directly in front of the door and there was my daughter, Louisa, peeking in the door, just laughing at me.  Just laughing.

I suppose I deserved it.  But it was great fun.