Break (Stuff) Dancing

The other night, I was at a party. It was a nicey-nice wine party. (Which made our Jagermeister and Red Bull a little awkward. I just want to add here that they need to just say it if it’s a wine party. At a wine party, it’s not BYOB, it’s BYOW. Just put it out there. Don’t be coy about it. I don’t want to bust in like one of the Blues Brothers if it’s a violin sort of thing.) The hosts were also serving a German drink made of heated wine with whole oranges, burnt sugar, and other stewed spices called Gloog. (Umlaut over one of the “o”s. Don’t ask which one. Google it, monkey!) The attendees were mostly couples that were professors/intellectuals. This was confirmed for me when at one point, there was a brief nerdoff about German linguistics near my liquor! This was just a case of of two warriors circling each other, struttin’ their stuff and showing their plumage to intimidate their opponent.

So, I went outside…

My goal was to one, cool off. The small house was hot and crowded. It almost rained nerdsweat ™ from the ceiling. My second goal was to draw people outside where cool air could be found. I heard later that a true nerdoff started after we went outside. Men whippin’ out their calculators like they were six-shooters. (Nerds do not walk ten paces. They walk ten meters, and turn around. Or, they agree upon a longitude and latitude, and just go there, hopefully without tripping on nothing. They may not keep their balance every time, but eventually, they do turn around.) One guy at our table outside, an employee at Sony (who was not thoughtful enough to hand out electronics) started calling our picnic table the “VIP Area” loudly enough to be heard inside. Within one hour, every attendee was standing outside (not enough room at the VIP table) watching people breathe fireballs fueled with Bacardi 151. Once again, a party brought down to the lowest common denominator. Just call me Caligula. *bow*

Later, back inside…

There were two Indian women inside dancing to Indian/hip-hop mixes. (crap, I’m going to get the terminology wrong. Last night, in my haze (see above) I claimed that Indians speak Indian. This is the intellectual equivalent of saying that Mexicans speak Mexican, or Americans speak American, and they were not shy about letting me know by their response. I claimed a hot-wine mulligan, and that seemed to work, at least this one time.They ARE Indian. They SPEAK Hindi. (IhopeIhopeIhope.) Still, they were kind about it.

I had noted that it was cool (cause cool is such an intellectual word) seeing people perform the dance moves that I saw on Showtime India Extreme on the AZN Network. When I commented on the moves, I found out that one of the women dancing was a choreographer for bhangra (Too lazy to link it. You gotta Google it.) competitions. She was kind enough to offer to teach me some moves. With a wooden floor, I knew it would be best to go shoeless. So, she starts a move with just feet, and begin to copy it successfully. She calls out that she’s going to add arms, and I cry back, “NO ARMS! NO ARMS!” (When you “add arms,” you add the arm movements, which will take away from the concentration on your feet movements. I WASN’T ready to stop concentrating on the feet movements.) Eventually, we add feet movements and rotating the whole thing in a circle. From what I heard, I did a good job. I did not get to dance long. Despite my making sure that Mongo was not dancing near anything breakable, something broke. With a crash. To the floor. Out of my arms reach. Too close to me.

We were all confused, because nobody hit anything. Then, I figured out that there was a small candle in a glass holder that had a Jurassic Park moment. (You know, where the vibrations of the T-Rex made the surface of the drink ripple.) Poor, poor candle slowly but surely vibrated its way off of the edge of the television set it was upon. (Probably calling for help the entire time, but Mongo was beating the poor wooden floor to death, and with the music turned up, the call went unanswered.) THAT was the end of my dancing.

Later, I heard a quote that came from the kitchen.

In response to the shaking, “What IS that”?
“Oh, Mike’s dancing.”

They peaked out, and I was indeed dancing.