What am I doing here?

*

Spandex, lamé, headbands, short shorts, athletic socks, grinding up the dancefloor, crowd-surfing to DJs who plays squeaky sounds, DJs who mash up samples and call it groundbreaking, some drug I can’t even tell you’re on, teenagers, kids who look like teenagers… what am I doing here?

Maybe it’s because I’ve been to “too many” dance shows lately. Maybe the planets aligned differently this summer and I’m suddenly no longer the same person I used to be. I like to dance. I like to dance a lot. My preferred style of dancing is called “jumping up and down and shaking” (jumping down is an interesting concept but we can talk about that another day) and I have been doing it freely and wildly since, oh, 1993. Before that, I danced but it was comme il faut. I was all awkward circle dancing at the Loyola gym, or waiting for some boy who turned out to be gay to make out with me to Roxette. I looked around at how the other girls danced and I just couldn’t do it like them. Thank God for Britpop. Thank God for Damon Albarn releasing the hoppy dance craze. Thank God for wicked fast drum beats and pounding electronica. Thank God for Franz Ferdinand and Interpol and every other nerd-jerky kind of music that finally was in sync with what I’d had in my body the whole time. No more of this sinewy, cool chic dancing. Dance, dance, dance to the radio.

And then, I don’t know. People started saying the kids at the places I like to dance at are too young. I said I ignore them. And then, suddenly, at the MSTRKRFT show at the SAT on September 1, I suddenly saw them. I had seen them before and suddenly I *saw* them: the dayglo tube dresses, everything cheesy about the 80s, tap dancing, gyrating, we-just-got-out-of-8th-grade-gym-class kids. So what am *I* still doing here? I swear that night I could feel the gap between me and the rest of the crowd stretching wider right before my eyes. I can barely listen to these people chatter, much less commune with them on a sweaty dancefloor. I am on the verge of not understanding a thing about them anymore. I am old. I am a hasbeen. And I don’t even care what they think.

When I was 17 I used to go dancing at this club with a particular boy and his friends, and I remember how we used to be shocked if anyone as old as 25 came in. What were they doing there, it was so weird!

Ultimately, I don’t think age has everything to do with it. I had friends who were never into the debauchery of dance, drugs and delirium, no matter how young they were. And I know there are people who will never want to leave that environment, no matter how old they get. It’s not them; it’s me. Scratched record, something skipped. I opened my eyes and I saw that I was in a foreign country that used to be mine. I decided I wanted to leave. But not before Justice on October 19 (!)
* if you can tell me who this is, you are a young shooting star.