Guest Spotlight: PdT "Why I Don't Dance"

About the author: PdT is an architect in Miami who I have had the pleasure of knowing for the past seven or eight years. He has his own blog on MySpace, but his layout of many flashing lights and moving icons could cause epileptic fits.

Footloose is the reason I don’t and can’t dance. The movie came out in 1984 and at nine or ten years old I was still an impressionable child. I don’t remember if I actually saw it at the theater, but having an older sister you get exposed to their tween obsessions one way or another. I just wasn’t ready for Kevin Bacon at that age, not to be homophobic or anything, but compared to Lori Singers, who was a fucking mess in this movie, getting beat up and tossed around by her fucking goon boyfriend, it was a close call as to who was the prettiest on the set. In fact during the movie I kind of got them confused.
So apparently dancing was a big deal and this town had banned it. Kevin Bacon shows up and wants to dance and they hate him because he’s from the 80s and they live in Kansas or something. Things are not necessarily "footloose" after all, in fact something as inconsequential and light-hearted as dancing was much more loaded than our title would suggest. John Lithgow the preacher gets on his case and the goons dislike him cause he's pretty and they ain’t, so they fight him. He “looses” it and goes off to an abandoned factory to literally interpret his frustrations and his anger through the most logical form, dance. For weeks I wondered if I should express my displeasure at having to pick up my room by doing a Glissade and demi-plié in the kitchen. He was washing away his frustrations with dancing sweat and consequently purged away my need to dance forever. It was just way too much to out there, I didn't want to bare my soul bro, I just wanted to dance, what’s the big deal. Maybe John Lithgow was right, a man just wasn’t meant to move in that way. I wasn’t ready. It was a form of femininity I did not know men were capable of. He was so lithe, limber and into it, he just threw himself with a reckless abandon at the dance floor (or in this case abandoned factory floor). How could you just do something without thinking I thought? I just knew from watching him that if this is what dancing is about, then I might as well move to a town that has banned it. In the end Bacon was right and I had to learn. Luckily It was later that I discovered alcohol and drugs alleviated self consciousness, but only in perfect balances. - PdT