Gynomite!

So, I dance. I’ve been dancing since I was a child, and I started with this horrid product:

Get in Shape, Girl!, the item that launched a thousand eating disorders.  I would put on the requisite pastel leotard and shake those damn streamers around while listening to Prince in my garage, but dancing alone felt disorganized, and lonely.  I then proceeded on to classes at the local dance studio, where I took jazz, tap, and ballet. I was already too old to be a proper ballerina, but enjoyed careening around the wooden floor in shiny patent tap shoes. I loved being in class every week, loved how my heart would race, loved watching myself move in unison with 12 other girls, loved the stretchy fun clothes I got to wear.  I lived for recitals, where my dance class and I would hover backstage, nervous and screeching, before donning neon green unitards and too-heavy makeup.  I was hopelessly cool when I danced, at least to myself, and in my dance pictures, my chin is held at a haughty angle, my eyebrows cocked arrogantly, even at age 9.  I took dance for four years until I discovered boys and the idea of not giving a shit. My body, which liked to jump and point and run and vamp, was put away in storage, and replaced with eyeliner and a scowl.   I didn’t dance, I expressly refused to dance, for the next ten years or so.  My eyebrows returned to their regular position.

After growing up, getting an education, moving to Chicago, and turning my own life upside down, I caught a glimpse of my childhood happiness, my naive ego, and decided it was time to get that back into my life.  I took a dance class with this unstoppable force of a woman, Michelle “Toots” L’Amour, and thus I learned burlesque, the art of the tease.

I remembered, REMEMBERED the childhood glee of realizing all the crazy ways my body can move and push itself, the ridiculous joy of making eye contact with another girl in the mirror while dancing and smiling like an idiot. I remember it as a feeling of power, and of freedom, and it still is.  I dance in grocery stores, throwing myself over the selection of oranges. I dance in bars when no one else is dancing. I dance at dance parties and in my living room with equal intensity.  I am a highly concentrated version of myself when I am dancing, an unstoppable force, zany and flush-cheeked and powerful.  My chin is as haughty as ever.  I loved burlesque classes for how they helped me remember that girly hurricane of a tyrant that I was as a child, and for helping me to name her.  She is Gynomite.

But over time I realized that as much as I adore burlesque, I am not going to get naked on a stage.   No disrespect to the ladies that do, it’s just not my style.  So I take as many fun classes as I can now and lie in wait for Gynomite to make her debut.

That’s me on the left, with one of my idols, Angie Pontani.  My ultimate goal is a dance troupe of women who like to rock costumes and dance hard and sweat hard and create funny routines about clowns, and do it all in heels while smiling. I know we’re out there somewhere, waiting to be assembled, each of us looking up whenever we hear Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” as if someone has just called our name from far away.  When we form Sparkle Motion, finally, Gynomite can come out to play.