ARE YOUR DANCING DAYS OVER?

A friend of my mother’s called her, crying. “I’m so depressed,” she wept. “I hate getting old. I miss going out and dancing.”

“Can you believe that?” my mom said as she recounted the call to me later that day. “I said to her, ‘Joan, your dancing days are over!’”

“Holy shit, Mom,” I said. “That’s a really insensitive response.”

“Why?” my mom said, “We’re almost 80 years old. I think Joan needed some tough love.”

Maybe Joan did, but I can’t take it. I might be several decades removed from 80, but I can’t bear the idea of “dancing days” being categorically over, like how Lobsterfest® ends on an pre-ordained date and the Red Lobster menu goes back to normal like the magic never happened. Obviously this isn’t just about dancing. It’s about the expiry of a life lived adventurously, a firefly stomped without ceremony. Your dancing days are over. How sad that is, how final.

Sally Lippman

My parents aren’t afraid of aging, or the afterlife. “I bet I’m going to die on this mattress,” my dad once said cheerfully after buying a new Sealy. My mom, as you can probably infer from her conversation with Joan, has always been nonchalant about the fact that winter comes, petals drop, and cha cha heels go into storage. Me, I refuse to go gently. I have been to the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, so I know that even ghosts can dance. There was a woman named Sally Lippman, a.k.a. Disco Sally, who spent the last years of her life at Studio 54. “It’s like a drug,” she told The Washington Post. “It” was the music, but you know it was something more. It was that cone of power that builds when people gather and rave and revel, it was the lost boys behind the bar with their small briefs and steel jiggers, it was capital-L Life. 

But we can’t all be Disco Sally. Not long ago I read an interview with a young artist— I think it was Phoebe Bridgers— who talked about how her favorite thing to do in New York was to “follow the night.” That one got me! I, too, used to follow the night, back when I had skin like a French bisque doll and no fear of the morning. The ticking of the clock was faint then, the trees were full, the fountains were running, you get the picture. We’d go from point to point on the map, with only a vague idea of what came next. These open-ended odysseys don’t last forever. When you get older, you start telling the night to go on ahead without you. Your body gets tired, or your social battery dies, or you realize the babysitter is going into overtime. Last Saturday night I left a party at 10:40. The party was at a bar in Echo Park filled with kids who were just getting started. As I walked to my car, I thought about how excited I was to get home and use my Water Pik. 

Maybe there’s joy in knowing that the party continues for the next generation after I head home to irrigate my gum line. There are still nights being followed and strangers being kissed and girls praising each other in bar bathrooms that smell like that pink hand soap. I still don’t believe that anyone’s dancing days are ever over, not metaphorically at least. I’ll dance through a memory if I have to, I’ll dance on my own grave.