Dancing with Danger

I’ve been thinking about the whole nonsense of dance clubs and dance parties. They should really call them temptation and indiscretion clubs and parties.

Things really got strange in this area when I moved to Chicago in 1987 at the age of 21. My brother got me a job at a Chicago insurance agency, and I headed out of Dowagiac, Michigan (population 6,000 give or take), full of promise and potential.

You see, I interview well. Boy do I have stories to tell. Talk about wet behind the ears, green, ignorant. . . you get the picture. I’ll get to those stories later.

But back to dancing. I remember once my boss had a super bowl party. She rented out a bar at a hotel. At stuff like that, I always felt like the boy in the bubble or that I was some how only partially opaque.

Fortunately some woman, a friend of my bosses asked to dance with me. It was a slow dance. She was pretty close, but not plastered on me like that other time. She gracefully put her hand up on my neck, and things were progressing nicely.

You know, back in Dowagiac, I was in these community theatre plays. The cast and crew would go out dancing. The bowling alley would let under-agers in as long as we didn’t drink alcohol. When it came time to dance, the whole group would go out on the floor. When the slow dance came, if you were near a girl you would say, “Want to dance this one?” The answer would be yes or no, and you would either dance or sit down and chat with the rest of the group. There was a certain amount of sensuality. A slow dance is something rather like an choreographed extended hug set to music. Being an Aspie, my brain would automatically chart out the girl's body type and wonder about how she was designed. Being a boy I would wonder about other things as well. That said, it was fairly harmless, and frankly led to nothing further other than some more dancing. The fast songs came back on and the whole group came back out.

My experience at the Super Bowl party was far different. Remember, I said the woman had gracefully placed her hand on my neck. Then she started to massage it with a hand that must have been made out of cast iron. I played it cool and tried not to react. I think she said something like, “It’s o.k. I’m a psychologist. Men like this.” I felt suddenly like a creature from another planet. Here I was in a rented bar, dancing with madam crusher, in a room full of people that didn’t know me, and no real way of figuring out what I was supposed to do to have a normal time.

Dance clubs have always been strange even when I would go with people I know. They morf into strange creatures as they slowly get drunk. I was dancing with my boss (if that isn’t weird, what is), and she fell down onto the floor. I think the impact of her fanny hitting the floor created something of a concussion wave. That shouldn’t be confused with a percussion wave, which would be a group of drummers in a football stadium . . . never mind. Now how am I supposed to consider my boss as a skilled professional when she has a few too many drinks and then falls down on the dance floor?! This violates my sense of how the world is supposed to be ordered.

I honestly don’t understand the whole idea of let's go out and have a good time by getting drunk and doing things we won’t remember! Couldn’t you just take a sleeping pill and more safely be unconscious that way?

I think that’s enough for now, except for this. My wife is the perfect dancing partner. I don’t like crowded dance clubs and neither does she. What am I saying is we haven’t gone out dancing for probably 13 years. When we were dating and we had the urge to dance on occasion, we would go on a Monday or Tuesday night so that we had the place to ourselves.

She’s my kind of woman.

Join me for more Aspie support and information at HASD Heros (http://www.smartgroups.com/groups/hasdheros