Dancing Through Life

I am 41-years-old, and I was dancing around my kitchen, today, to the new Britney Spears CD. It's awesome! I love it!

It's radical! Cool! Boss ! Bitchin'! It's major! Gnarly! Like, tubular! Totally rockin'! It is off the chain! It's slammin'! . . . uh, it's dope.

That's it, mostly. Those are all the hip, current, and not-so-current colloquialisms that I can come up with, from the past four decades or so, to describe how much I really like this new album.

But when does it all slow down? When exactly am I supposed to be "too old" for certain activities? And even if I don't have to be too concerned about all of that, when does it start to be too creepy?

I was hired to do double duty on board my first cruise ship contract. When not dancing in the nightly revues, I was working as an assistant cruise director ("camp counselor for adults"). For the male dancers/ACD's, our required duties included having to dance with the female passengers on Big Band Night--or as we called it, "drag a bag." Of course, most of the women passengers were senior citizens. It wasn't too terrible, as I really enjoyed swing music, and any boogie-woogie from the forties.

But it made me wonder, back then in the early nineties: What will my generation be dancing to, in thirty or forty years, once we had achieved senior citizen status ourselves? What will replace Big Band Night when we're on a luxury liner in our golden years? It's hard to imagine silver-haired ladies and men bumpin' and grindin' to Madonna's "Like a Virgin," or Michael Jackson's "Beat It."

For some reason, my imagination keeps going back to a bunch of old folks getting down to Prince's "Darling Nikki," not that that was ever a big dance hit.

If you're ever in the North Hollywood neighborhood, near Universal Studios, try to go to Oil Can Harry's on a Saturday night. Normally a country & western gay bar (I think), the club has a retro night on Saturdays, playing seventies disco and eighties pop. It seems to be a more age-appropriate atmosphere for me, with a mostly middle-aged crowd. And in that club, among people in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, and even older, how old you are does not matter.

It doesn't matter at home, either, or in my own mind, really. What matters is how endorphin-high I feel, as I get my groove on.