Think I'll Keep My Hands Down

Yesterday was a busy, busy day. I had to work the overnight from Wednesday into Thursday's dawn hours, and was able to get four hours of sleep before getting up to meet my brother Sweetums' neighbor in the Zurich metropolitan area, who was visiting New York with an old college friend from Vicenza, Italy. I decided to take them to my workplace- I take a lot of visitors there because it's so pretty. I spent the day taking them to other tourist attractions and had a late lunch with them before getting them to the Metro-North station. I was a good day, and they got a couple of behind-the-scenes peaks which aren't part of the usual tour. We were accompanied by a lovely woman from Puerto Rico and her hilariously divalicious twelve year-old daughter... needless to say, we hit it off with them very well.

After this whirlwind tour, I got a call from a friend of mine who was going to a regular happy hour event at a local municipal golf course. Twenty bucks for a BBQ buffet and a live band? Yeah, sign me up! The food was good, the drinks reasonable, and the band a reliable cover band with "WEDDING BAND" virtually tattooed on their faces. They played a typical soup-to-nuts blend of mid-to-late 20th century and current music. Note to all cover bands- while playing Bizarre Love Triangle is an inappropriate move at all but the most countercultural weddings, it's one of the best dance songs ever written, and should be in any non-wedding repertoire.

I am a dancing fool- I just love to get my ass on the dance floor and go nuts. My old mentor Radomir used to love to quote Lao Tsu's aphorism: "Never give a sword to a man who can't dance." Yeah, the bastard loves to shake his proverbial booty. Last night, one of my part-time co-workers was at this happy hour with some of her co-workers from her other job. Soon after I got to the event, she asked me to hit the dance floor with her and I told her, "I just got here, I'll come dancing two gin-and-tonics from now."

I'm not an expert on current popular music (though the band hilariously played the ubiquitous Gangnam Style, their dedication to phonetically learning the lyrics was impressive), and was struck by the number of songs which include an injunction to put one's hands in the air. Me? I don't put my hands in the air between Memorial Day and Labor Day.