Dancing Queen
Looking at the skinny jeans tucked into boots, long sweaters, dolman sleeves, platform shoes, and the disco ball I recently saw in a store, I knew the saleswoman, who looked 25, had no idea what life was like here in New York City in the late 1970s and 1980s. A young cabbie treated me like royalty because I told him I saw “Queen” at a concert and couldn’t bring myself to recite. all the rock concerts she’d been to, or tell her that afterward, she’d spent every Friday night dancing in the clubs: Studio 54, Xenon, Ice Palace. I have happy memories of my girlfriend and I getting ready and sprucing up for Friday night, THE night, OUR night. It took days to figure out what we would wear, find the perfect belt, shoes, or figure out what we were doing with our hair; we bought Paul Mitchell “SCHPRITZ” (which was actually glue in a plastic pump bottle) by the gallon, so we could go dancing.
When I walk up to the stair climber at the gym, my iPod is my teacher and Donna Summer’s “Enough is Enough” is styleEnough to get the blood pumping through me… If you see me up there, swaying and turning with movements that would challenge the balance of an average person (my age)… I promise I won’t fall. I can dance, step and read at the same time.
In the early ’80s, I was an aerobics flunkey, and I’m not a runner; I’m more of a piledriver when I run… I even tried pole dancing, but it was like Lucille Ball on pot as I approached the bar, gracefully got up, stepped onto it, and promptly fell off, hurting my arm and leg on the way down. I am, to say the least, bored with loop walking, so the treadmill is not for me. Forget turning to nowhere…it can’t be done. But when I’m “on foot” that low center of gravity is very useful. Some mornings you can find me in the gym, quite early, spinning on the machine, reading glasses dangling from my nose and a day’s worth of email, business documents and other stuff to dump piled on the floor next to me. Throwing the papers from my haughty mount I make piles of musts and disposables. Along with everything that floods my morning mind, it never occurs to me that I care what anyone who sees this routine might think. From time to time I would blurt out the sounds of song pieces and elicit some “SHUT UP” from my fellow exercisers. But I don’t care. I’m not ashamed.
Every once in a while I look in the mirror and think it’s really pathetic or funny or maybe both, as I wait for my butt to defy gravity for another year and notice that my arms still look pretty good to me considering I’m a Jewish woman of a certain age. I can’t afford to do what Demi Moore did: I’m stuck on my elbows and knees for life.
The only images I have of myself dancing as a child come from my father’s 8mm film footage. There I was in ballet class, the whole class moving to the right and me moving to the left, with my finger up my nose. My sister became a dancer and I took piano lessons, guitar lessons, art lessons, anything that prevented me from dancing; there was a reason for it. very The young dance partner whispered, “I don’t know how to dance like that” (although I knew…) and I whispered, “I’m the prom queen, I won’t let you down…” Nine dances later, we were called John (Travolta) and Olivia (Newton John –) there’s something to be said for that, considering I was absolutely born in a year that I could have been my partner’s mother. Every woman I’ve worked with thought she needed a young guy, so I fulfilled her fantasy.
In 1977 I came to New York to attend New York University. It was a time that she has never left me. The end of the Vietnam War in 1975 gave license to a generation of dreamers and plotters to do our thing… The anger and fighting was over… The clothes, the makeup, the hair, the music, the drugs, the promiscuity before AIDS, the Jane Fonda videos, all gave a certain appeal and importance to the new age freedom. The dance hallowed it… When I came to New York I was really a hybrid, part Jewish American princess wannabe, part activist, part hippie/bohemian artist, writer. It was here, through my love of clothes and makeup and my love of dance that my true identity was born. I’ve been to Bond’s, The Underground, The Limelight, Max’ Kansas City and of course Studio and Xenon. If I’m totally cool, I am. completely great for that. (Okay, maybe not quite great) This information certainly makes me old by many people’s standards. And yes, Rent and Chorus Line were my favorite works.
Those clubs created a platform for Madonna, Cher, Donna Summer and a new kind of socializing where no matter where you went, it was all about how sexy you could look, and how many drugs you could do, and make it home at least for the next afternoon. The man in the white suit was “the man…” no strings attached, lots of chests, chains and even tattoos. Unlike today’s techno, we had moves and moves were everything. My girlfriend and I practiced all the best moves on each other, and our weekend getup: gold lamé, leopard skin, sequined bandeau tops, chunky belts, skintight halter-neck jumpsuits, and lots of white and soft glitter that sparkled under the lights.
The gate guard policies of the time added that last element of excitement: being turned away at the gate would be the total failure of a week’s work. Better to be a pretty and well-dressed model. Disco clothing was NEVER EVER acceptable for day, but for night it was the only possible way to be part of the action, and the happier, crazier, bustier and shimmerier, the better. A man’s white satin jacket and medallion resting on a weathered chest with an open-collared shirt and turned-up collar, now vile and de rigueur, was considered hot.
In those days, “Starbuck” was still just a figment of Charles Dickens’s imagination, an ATM was probably a sex toy, the concept of “the internet” probably lived in the bowels of some underground government cavern. An “i-pod” would have been the definition of something botanical, “Twitter” would certainly be something describing post-orgasm movements, “Facebook” would have been a magazine, and research was still being done in a library. (I had to learn Dewey Decimal System-WHAT?) If we wanted to “connect” we had to call our friends on a landline and even wait until the phone wasn’t “busy”. Payphones were actually a great convenience and not the outdated relics they are today.
Barnes and Noble had a store in Greenwich Village. Crazy Eddie on Greenwich Avenue. it was the best place to buy a television in New York City. And the idea of a big box store like Circuit City, or Best Buy, or Comp USA (two of which have now failed) were all mall conveniences; if you had asked any of us, we would have bet money that you would never have seen one of those in New York City. The subways were dirty and slow, their windows smashed, the walls covered in graffiti and full of the stench of the homeless (now that I think about it, where did all those homeless people go?).
For those of us who grew up loving the Monkees and Mike Connor in Mannix and thought Isaac Hayes had the sexiest voice on the planet, we cut our long hair into layers and blew it into carefully stretched bonnets with that perfect flip back to give you the Farah Fawcett look. Charlie’s Angels were hot, Brooke Sheilds made her her beautiful entrance as nothing came between her and her “Calvins” of hers. Cher was still the “sneaker” thing (when was the last time you heard that word?) in her Bob Macky dresses, Washington Square Park (where she lived) was the center of the drug world and the whole world as far as I was concerned. Soho was cool and where the artists hung out and where we went to browse the shops and eat at the fancy restaurants.
Sam Shepard was the new, cutting-edge young playwright. Stephen Sondheim was doing his thing… Star Wars, The Deer Hunter, Annie Hall and Sophie’s Choice were all in the Oscar nominations and a young actress named Meryl Streep was being discovered. We didn’t have seven screens in a home, we had one, and even if our TVs were big and bulky and black and white, we all knew where we were when President Kennedy was shot…and we all made sure we had a TV on the day of MTV’s launch. The first cable systems were transmitted by large antennas: there were no satellites and no satellite radio. A walkie talkie was the closest thing to a cell phone any of us would have and they were reserved for skiers or children. If someone had been sitting next to me in a bar in the mid-seventies and described my life strapped to a Blackberry, I would have asked them what drugs were in their drink, how could a piece of fruit have given me instant connectivity to all aspects of my life? When I graduated college, Jennifer Beals was the sexiest woman on the planet in Flashdance, in those cut-off-the-shoulder hoodies and her leg warmers…and then, she was a grown-up lesbian on the L-word…go figure…guys…
I remember my first Sushi date, and my friend talking to me while trying the Wasabi, a trip that would change my life…
Blondie was the hot entry into the punk scene with Max’s Kansas City waitress, Debra Harry, considered one of the sexiest women on the music scene. Debra Harry is now 64 years old. Betsy Johnson is 68 years old and is about mainstream and Patricia Feld dressed the girls in Sex in The City.
Even if I was drinking and taking drugs and having sex… I came to work every day and still have a decent work ethic. I can still see how Jane Fonda’s burn contributed to my greater good, as she did in those classic exercise videos. And so, when dancing to Queen here, I step on those machines, the disco ball might have collapsed long ago, but I know, despite the fact that I obsess and fantasize about all the bodily changes that could make any plastic surgeon rich, my generation is the richest, healthiest, and most world-changing…we give over $100 to charity last year, and that’s the richest, most world-changing year we give to most of 100 dollars to the organization, and that is the richest year, and that is a lot of things, and the most capable of being a world, and the most capable of making the world. The goodness. I have NO complaints, and even though I look ridiculous in the gym, I love my i-pod, I love life, and my neighbors who can see me through their windows will tell you: I’m still dancing.