Thursday, August 16, 2007

Eddie and His Bitchy Weapon Dance


"What color is it, and does it have a make-up mirror?"

Those were the first words out of my fabulous friend, Eddie's mouth when his dad had bought him his first (used) car.
I love Eddie because he affirms who I am, especially when I am in doubt about my priorities in life. I almost never pay attention to the make and model of any automobile, one of the things Domestic Partner is critical about.

I know what my strengths are. Paying attention to cars has never been important to me.

Eddie and I have been having fun since 1985, when we got hired into the Electrical Parade together, at Disneyland.
He has taught me many things, like how to pose. In the eighties, Eddie had a couple of mannequins at home, which he was constantly putting in different poses. And he was perpetually demonstrating the different poses to me and other friends. We called the mannequins "Eddie's Giant Pose-able Barbies."
Eddie was also the one to teach me the Weapon Dance. We were dancing one night at D.O.K. in Garden Grove, the first gay bar I nervously went to at age 19 ("Faggots and homos and queers, oh my!"). When a young man started dancing possessively with a cutie that Eddie had had his eye on, Eddie started miming weapon attacks toward the young man as part of his dancing. He held an imaginary bow and arrow, which he waved from side to side, before letting the arrow fly toward the interceptor. Keeping tempo with the club's dance music, he mimed pistol shots at his head. He swung an invisible ax at him. He raised his fist above his head and repeatedly stabbed the air with a pretend-knife, a la Norman Bates.
After each attack, Eddie's open palm would suddenly cover his mouth which was agape in mock shock and surprise. I could hear inside my head his inaudible gasps over the allegedly unintended injury.

Last week, I came home from work to see a new, shiny . . . sports-SUV type vehicle in our garage. Domestic Partner had bought himself a new car. It's a gorgeous shade of silver, and I took it for granted that there would be a handy lighted make-up mirror in the front passenger side for me.
"It's a what?" I asked DP. "A Ford? A Lexus?"
"It's an Infiniti FX35," he informed me, exasperation and condescension mixed in his tone.
I shot an imaginary arrow at him when he wasn't looking.

2 comments:

Prince Gomolvilas said...

Ha ha ha! I wanna do the Weapon Dance!

Peter Varvel said...

Don't do it around me--someone is bound to get impaled.