Baby, Won't You Dance With Me?

On a night out, when I tell my boyfriend I want to dance, he’ll start telling me the music isn’t ‘right’. He doesn’t like the band. There aren’t enough people on the dance floor. There are too many people on the dance floor.  It’s just never the right song:  too slow, too fast, too techno. 

But it all boils down to one thing really – not enough alcohol.

Eventually, he’ll pinpoint the problem. He needs another drink first.  And another.  And another.  At last, he feels sufficiently fuelled.  At this stage, he’s mad for it. All indecision and uncertainty is forgotten - why haven’t we been dancing all night?  Time is pressing; we need to be out there, on the floor, showing the rest of them how it’s done.

     He takes me by the hand, or what he thinks is my hand; at this stage he is just as likely to grab my elbow – or foot.  He leads me on to the dance floor, not stopping when I bend down to tighten the strap on my shoe – I feel my feet will need all the support they can get.  It’s reminiscent of that scene from the Quiet Man where Maureen O’Hara gets dragged home by the top of the head by John Wayne – and she loves every second of it.  I’m mad to hit the dance floor. 

 I forget you see.  I forget the co-ordination skills of my boyfriend are poor when he is sober, never mind when he is drunk.  You know the way those pull-along trolley suitcases have become so popular? There are two ways of wheeling them. The first is to pull it slightly behind yourself. This way you cut a way ahead of your case through the crowd and it is unlikely anyone will trip over your luggage. The second is to wheel the case alongside you, thereby increasing the breadth of the space you take up on the footpath.  These case wheelers trot along paying no heed to the fact that their case is little over a foot high and people can’t see it until they are sent flying over it.  Passersby, streetlamps, bins – nothing stops them.  My boyfriend belongs to the latter category, except he wouldn’t be seen dead with a pulley case – I’m his baggage, or at least that’s how he treats me. He pulls me along and I do my best with the limited bit of rope I have (his arm) to avoid oncoming obstacles.

And now he's pulling me onto the dance floor. He eyes a fairly empty spot and makes for it. Then he’s off. He gives a quick look around to see what ‘moves’ are de rigeour in these circles.  Then he starts not to replicate them, but to better them. This involves kicking his legs higher, waving his arms harder, and shaking his body quicker than everyone else on the floor. But his favourite moves involve spinning me around. He sends me out like a spinning top on a string, then winds me back in again, out again, in again, under his arm, twirl.  At this point I’m beginning to feel dizzy. At over six foot, he has plenty of leg and arm to throw around the place and with which to throw me. I’m sent flying to various corners of the dance floor. All that talk of a suitable song was in vain – it doesn’t matter what the song is, he is dancing to his own beat.

     At last, it’s over. I’m beat. He tells me he wasn't that gone on the song.  Funny, but somehow the dancefloor has emptied. The others musn’t have really liked it all that much either.