rm | barn dance!

One of my earliest memories and, in fact, my first memory of magic, of serendipity, of doing my will in the world is from when I was five, and my mother and I went with my father on a business trip to Chicago. It was the summer, and a terrible one at that -- 105 every day we were there, so that my mother and I sat in the hotel room while my father was at work because it was too hot to go out.

But on one of the nights, they took me to a bar to hear Irish music. It's an odd thing, considering that most of he oddities of my childhood were entirely different from this sort of thing, that my parents were always taking me to bars and casinos and whatever inappropriate for a child places you could possibly think of if there was some sort of cool music to hear.

I insisted in dressing up in this fancy, gauzy skirt and top my aunt had bought me, and when we got there and I heard the music, I got up to dance in that way children unselfconsciously do. A fellow got up, handsome as hell, black hair, thin and grinning and with not a shred of condescension for me, and bowed to me and started doing a jig, slow at first so I could imitiate it and then faster and faster, and then people were clapping in time with the music and had formed a small circle around us and when he bent down and grabbed my hands to swing me around, I saw the that circle had doubled in size behind us and everyone else was now joining the dance. After, he bowed to me, all solemn, and told me I was a faerie princess, not in the way you tell girls who want to be pretty, but in the way you tell girls who are quite serious and undeniably strange. It is my perhaps silly and vain belief that other people who were there that night still tell this story too.

Tonight, when I arrived at the Barn Dance a dance was just starting up and I ran out to join but had no partner. The caller hollered for me to come up to the top of the set and he'd dance with me. And so I did, dived right in with a live Irish band and footwork that just makes itself up and my perfect little swinging skirt and my hillarious boots and no damn clue what I was doing and rocked it, and while the whole night was fun, that first dance was oh so much just like when I was five.

The band, back there in 1978 in Chicago, btw, was The Chieftains.

Meanwhile, all of you are on notice that you're coming to the next Barn Dance. I don't care if you don't dance. It's so charming and fun and exciting and magical and any of you who write anything not set in this where/when will be assailed by plot bunnies due to this sort of thing. I swear to you.

Also it was delightful to move my muscles in an agressively casual but structured way. It felt of a theme with fencing, but also a necessary antidote. I suppose maybe I can do frivolous too, as long as it's with intensity.