First Dance

Today is our sixteenth wedding anniversary. We got out our wedding album and looked through the pictures. There were all our friends with funny-sounding laughs, seated at one table, laughing. There was my younger brother canoodling with the woman with whom he still shares his life. There were my friends from college, my husband’s cousin’s eighteen-month old (just graduated from high school last week), old family friends since passed on, my mysterious uncle who gave a twenty minute toast and then disappeared from our lives, his great uncle, a World War II vet in his eighties, and his fifty-something fiancée… and above all, there were ALL the guests, from one to eighty-five, smiling and getting groovy on the dance floor. 

We did not have a particular fancy wedding, though neither was it a quick fix at City Hall. Instead, we talked it over and we decided that we wanted to throw the Best Party Ever. The elements of this event, we agreed would be threefold:

Good food

Plenty of refreshment

A kick-ass band and a big dance floor

So, we rented the faculty club at UC Berkeley, a funky faux-medieval hunting lodge complete with a big, raftered hall hung with trophy heads; it was a deal, since I had already gotten my master’s degree there and they have alumni deals. We ordered up a dinner of roast leg of lamb and lots of extras, flooded the bar with Boeger wine and Sierra Nevada brews, and hired a purpose-built combo headed up by John Schott from for one of our favorite funk and blues bands, T. J. Kirk, which had recently broken up.

Different tables, same moose.

We parked the band under the moose head. The nameless combo consisted of John (guitar), a drummer, a bassist, and the most incredible young woman vocalist whose name has sadly slipped my memory. We had requested first set of more sedate American songbook classics, Cole Porter, the like. They delivered. People of all ages danced, and it was good.

For the second set, the band let down its proverbial hair and ventured off into the territory of funk, disco, and whateverthehellelse they felt suited the mood. The guests, especially the twentysomethings who were our peers, were pretty into it. Good manners and fancy dress be damned!

One of the things I told the lady who sewed my wedding dress, which was basically a sundress hepped up on blush-pink shantung and a crinoline, was that I had to be able to dance in it. And I could and did dance in it for hours.

We did not go to great lengths to choreograph or practice our first dance. We chose “Our Love is Here to Stay,” and we just did a little box step around the floor, laughing the whole time with the pleasure of it. I think we may have thrown in a few dips and spins, so I could show off my pretty dress (it had tiny buttons all the way down the back, punctuated by little, squared-off, sixties style bows, and have I mentioned that it was pale, pale pink?).

I have a great picture of my parents-in-law cutting the rug; who knew they could dance so well? They really stepped out to “I Get a Kick Out of You,” and “Lady is a Tramp.” Later, when the music got more Nasty, the bride and groom were photographically documented doing the kind of thing that comes naturally when you’ve gone to an inner-city high school and cut your social dancing teeth not on the waltz but on Run DMC and LL Cool J. Oh yeah, baby!

That’s what I remember enjoying most about the wedding. The whole thing was fun, from the wacky Zen Buddhist service led by the groom's cousin, a Zen priest who named himself a "JewBu" and whom we fondly called "Rebbe Sensei" (try chanting the Heart Sutra while having a fit of giggles), to seeing all our friends and family and family friends gathered in that super-pseudo feasting hall. But the dancing was the highlight. It was pure joy, as dancing so often is. That is why people, even those who say they cannot dance, love to dance. It is the body, smiling. Occasionally, someone who was there will still say something to us along the lines of “And you had the band… I danced until my feet hurt so much I had to go home.”

So, all you June brides, here is my advice to you. Economize on the dress, the cake, the flowers, and the photos (we had "table cameras" so our guests were our documentarians). Ixnay the wedding planner. Jordan almonds in little baggies on the tables, out! But DO NOT economize on the band! Because, if you can dance your way into the most important elective affinity of your life, surrounded by all the people you like best in the world, you can, one hopes, keep on dancing together for a long time to come. The mountains may tumble, Gibraltar may crumble – they’re only made of clay – but your love is here to stay.

Agon

That's right! Give it the old "red x through it" treatment and see if it works.

For two whole months now I have not gone to ballet class or even done a barre session at home. Instead, I have done innumerable (but still not sufficiently numerous) boring exercises and stretches designed to elongate my psoas and quadriceps muscles and strengthen their antagonists, the hamstring and the gluteus muscles. And? Well, my hip seems to be less creaky and cranky than before. But tonight I will put it to the test.

I am going to class.

The first and most important question is of course, what shall I wear? I’m thinking all black, a sort of ninja-stealth approach, so that perhaps nobody, myself and my body included, will really notice that I have crossed the “do not dance” line.

The second, and almost equally gripping quandary: how much do I want to tell the instructor? On the one hand, it seems the prudent thing to let the teacher know that one is coping with or recuperating from, or whatever it is I am doing with it, an injury. On the other hand, one does not want to go about making excuses for one’s low extensions and sloppily-closed fifths. And then, on the third hand (my metaphor here is growing extra arms), one does not want to bore the woman with one’s woes, or sound self-pitying. 

Ah, the sweet self-doubt of ballet! The familiar feeling comes reassuringly back to me. 

After all, the whole thing is really about struggle, about the contest between the mind’s conviction that one simply cannot do a triple pirouette en dehors from fifth and the body’s conviction that maybe one can. About the weariness with which one contemplates petit allegro and the verve with which one executes it. About the need for the tailbone to point to the earth and the crown of the head to yearn for the heavens. About the forward cant of the torso balancing the long counterweight of the leg in arabesque without assuming a pose reminiscent of Superman flying stiffly through the air in the comic books. 

Agon.

When George Balanchine chose that title for his 1957 ballet set to the music of his good buddy Igor, the man knew what he was doing. In its classical sense (according to the OED), agon is literally “A public celebration of games, including athletic, dramatic, and musical contests, in the ancient Greek or Roman world; a contest for a prize at such games.” The clip of an NYCB production from the early 1990s that I embedded here, I think, gives a good sense of the element of serious play at work. Megan LeCrone’s commentary on her “special relationship” to Agon  expands on the athleticism of the piece. Take that, Discobolus!

Also, in a more figurative use, the term can mean “A painful struggle, esp. a psychological one; a conflict, fight, competition,” and the score, as well as the choreography has elements of that, too. Watch Arthur Mitchell and Diana Adams perform the pas-de-deux in this 1957 clip, and the angsty-ness comes right through (all the more so in 1957, when the shock of seeing a biracial pair perform such a sensuous, if not erotic, piece on stage must have been terrific).

And so, off to the (ninja ballerina) games.