"The most fun you can have with your clothes on!"

“The most fun you can have with your clothes on!” is the phrase proudly displayed on the posterboard for CDNY, New York’s East Village Contra organization. Rachel, Lily, Hillia and I ran down the stairs, inhaling the chlorine smells of the YMCA. We had just had a delicious dinner of soup and sandwiches, choosing to sit outside of the restaurant rather than wait for seats inside. When our waitress looked at us like we were insane, I responded, “We’re pretending to be in Maine!”. She didn’t get it, and neither did the lady giving us the stink eye through the glass. Well, we didn’t stay there long. Forty-five minutes later we were skipping across the wet streets at high speed. Even though I had freshly duct-taped the holes in my shoes that day, I could feel the puddles from the thawed snow last Wednesday reducing the cardboard in the soles to a soggy mess. Dig it! (Earlier Rachel and I had agreed to start saying “dig it!” to things that were ‘Wonky’ or were otherwise deserving of an optimistic perspective). Wrought iron fire escapes? Dig it. Taxicabs powered by gnomes?*

Dig it.

So we stumbled our way up and down a series of stairs to get to the gymnasium where the contra dance was taking place. We paid our way in, and watched the first dance from the bleachers, feeling like contra wallflowers. It seemed incredibly complicated, and everybody knew what they were doing. What had we gotten ourselves into? An elderly woman in the spirit of Granny Clampett stuck her tongue out at us and whirled away in the arms of her partner, a rather dashing young man wearing a beautifully embroidered shirt. All right. It was on. After the band finished the first number I was asked to join a four by a lovely man named Artie, and quickly got the hang of it. He showed me the best way to swing and promenade, and soon I was grinning and clapping and feeling completely dizzy and disoriented. Dig it! Judging by what my friend Lynn the Librarian had said, I was expecting there to only be old/middle-aged folks there, but there was a wide range of ages and sexes. I was told that I was having too much fun by a bearded man wearing a long, sequined skirt, who led me through a Ladies Chain back to Artie. A man who seemed to be at least seven feet tall clumsily tried to swing me, and I repeatedly lost my footing trying to reach up to his shoulder. After the dance, I shook Artie’s hand enthusiastically and, wiping the sweat from the back of my neck, found the others to go drink some water. My next dance was with a Middlebury student; she led me chivalrously from one end of the line to the other, her arms always where I turned to find them. I caught a glimpse of Rachel do-si-do-ing intently with a really cute old man. The dance ended and we had a brief water/snack break, where Rachel and I realized that replacing the word ‘blood’ with ‘life force’ makes it sound so much more intense. For example, Noah somehow manages to lose a lot of life force whenever he is around an exacto knife. You can catch some pretty awful diseases from somebody else’s life force. A nearby college student overheard us and joined in, creatively adding, “I often donate life force”.

After this exchange, a gentleman named Mark taught me how to waltz, and I told him all about Chewonki. We talked for a bit about high school and working in a business (respectively), and about environmental education and farm work and living in the city. And then the dance was over, and all of a sudden it was 10:00. I said my goodbyes, and we left. My life force cooled down once we got outside, and we walked to a nearby coffee shop for some hot chocolate and cider before going home. Dig it!

¹ Gnomeo and Juliet, anybody? In theaters February 2011. Yeah Gillies!