DANCE FLOORS AND CORONAMANIA

My wife, Ellen, and I have danced in many places: in Newark’s Rutgers’ Student Center and law school basement parties and the chic, but short-lived, Club America; also at New York City’s early-80s Danceteria, mid-80s Lincoln Center outdoor Summer Swing and the Nightingale dive bar on the Lower East Side. On our honeymoon, we got down—literally—in a very dark, subterranean Costa Rican concept disco called El Tunel Del Tiempo (The Time Tunnel). Two years later, we danced under moonlight and palm trees alongside a Vieques, Puerto Rico oceanfront patio/bar. We also carried on at the painfully-loud Rodeo Bar New Year’s Eve 1990 party with Ellen carrying a bellyful of a baby who became a rock drummer.

Decades later, kids raised, we Salsa-ed to an almost deafening ten-person band with a horn section in a packed, small Medellin club called Son Havana. Perhaps most memorably, we bopped until we almost dropped in some unfancy, yet exotic places in Nicaragua. On our first trip there, we did so in a big, circular, open-air, but crowded, corrugated zinc-roofed pavilion surrounded by a 20-foot-high chain-link fence in an urban shanty town at Masaya’s edge. In the mountain city of Matagalpa during a subsequent visit, the club had a dance floor aside a ceiba tree left in place and allowed to grow through a gap cut into another metal roof. It rained through that gap the night we were there, so we danced some of the time in an indoor/outdoor downpour.

We’ve often stuck out like sore thumbs, for decades by complexion and more recently, by age as well. We have some great memories from these nights: clapping or howling along with people in crowded, loud, dark places often to jumpy, unfamiliar tunes in Spanish with some incongruous stuff like a Donna Summer medley thrown in, as other partiers in these crowded, dark venues surrounded us and signaled us to bust moves inside their human circle. These experiences aren’t stories with a quirky plot or a funny ending. Rather, in addition to the affection shared between Ellen and I, there was, with the larger group, shared motion, exuberance, mutual affinity and some amusing visuals and comments.

Are we great dancers? Not really, though one night in a large, waterfront Gloucester, Mass bar with a funky jazz band, of my friends labeled me “the best, straight, white, male dancer” he had seen. In life, one’s happiness often depends on who one is compared, or compares oneself, to. Despite all of TV’s trivia, singing and dancing contests, not every human activity needs to be a competition. When one goes all-in, what was once fun can turn into work.

Ellen and I have a basic sense of rhythm, coordination, and a core, cross-genre repertoire and we’re comfortable moving to music. Ellen’s a better dance follower than I’m a leader. As in life, she knows what I’m trying to communicate. As some—mostly women—say, women have to do everything men do, only backward and in heels. Though I can skate backward in circles in ice hockey skates and hardly any women can. So take that!

I feel the same way about dance as my brother’s artist friend, whom I mentioned last week, felt about the vaxxes: it’s something I’m supposed to do. Not as, with the vaxx, a concession to social pressure or some misplaced sense of duty, but instead, to celebrate my love for Ellen, community with unknown others and gratefulness for having vital and flexible bodies with unspecified, yet inevitable expiration dates.

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This past Friday evening, Ellen and I went to a county/arts group-sponsored outdoor “Salsa by the Bay” in Perth Amboy, New Jersey’s hillside Bayview Park. Perth Amboy is a densely populated, de-industrialized city of 55,000. Most of its old houses have small, if any, yards. A belt of highways and former factories—now warehouses—set its western and northern edges. Raritan Bay makes up the city’s eastern and southern boundaries. Perth Amboy’s location isolates it from the many other cheek-to-jowl cities and towns in the New York Metropolitan Area. It’s alone in a crowd.

Friday had the best weather of any day/night this summer. Before the eight-person band began to play, we sat on a park bench on a small hill, basked in a light breeze and gazed out at the wide bay and the sailboats in the marina in the foreground below as the sun dropped beyond the hill horizon behind us. Once you get a few miles from the Turnpike, New Jersey isn’t as ugly as they say.

The band played from nearly sunset until after dark. We danced nearly the whole hour-and-a-half. We were rusty and didn’t remember the full array of moves we had developed while, during peak Scamdemic, we did Saturday Night Salsa in our living room.

While those nights were pleasing, it’s much better to be among a crowd of people who are actively on the floor The women dress up and make-up to varying degrees. Some of them arrive in groups and happily dance with each other until men approach them and ask them to. Men don’t dance with each other. At least in the places we go to.

Being in a public dance setting clearly displays the pleasing and sometimes amusing physical and social differences between men and women. Life is more real and enjoyable when we don’t pretend that women and men are the same.

On Friday night, about 200 people, 80% Latin, 10% Black and 10% White, stepped the Salsa in close proximity on the impromptu floor of stone pavers about 100 feet in front of, and 30 feet in elevation above, the gazebo/bandstand, which had the bay behind it. Though no one was drinking, everyone was smiling. There were even a few kids under five bouncing to the music at their parents’ knees. No one wore a mask.

I hadn’t been in a public dance setting since before the Scamdemic began. Seeing so much motion and joy was beautiful. It sucked that such gatherings were forbidden during a contrived crisis.

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At any decent party, as on Friday, many people pair off in close proximity to other couples. On that evening, I thought briefly, and with derisive detachment, of all of the microbes being exchanged as dancers held hands, wrapped their arms around and breathed on each other and those nearby. No one seemed to be thinking about germs. Microbes have always been here. Before 2020, clubgoers never hid from these. They didn’t even consider them.

It’s not clear when or why the public largely, though belatedly, abandoned its Covophobia. It’s not as if The Virus—whatever it was or wasn’t—has disappeared. Some people are still said to be dying from it. I learned the day before Salsa Night that one of my relatives, vaxxed to the max, has just “gotten Covid” for at least the third time. In 2021, this same person stormed out of a room I had entered without a mask. She didn’t return until after I went home an hour later. Warning to re-entrants: I might’ve recklessly left some germs behind. Though somehow, I never got sick.

Any remotely healthy person could have safely danced at close range and/or with strangers any time during the Scamdemic. Dancing is a fun, low-cost Covid survival test. If you could move your body on two feet for ten minutes, The Virus couldn’t kill you. If you could dance even a little, you were far better protected from SARS-CoV-2 than was the most isolated, masked, vaxxed and boosted person who couldn’t. This had, by mid-March, 2020, already been proven by research. Why didn’t officials “Follow The Science?”

Since 2020, some people have aged out of salsa-bility, as Ellen and I soon might. During the past five years, as they were told to hide from others and wait for The Virus to be “crushed,” and their joints or organs worsened from age or inactivity, many aging but still-breathing individuals missed their last chances to do various enjoyable, physical and mental health-building activities like this. No one at any age should have forgone fun because the government and media effected a politically and economically-driven Scam. Life is short: ain’t nobody got time to waste.

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I’m not sure about this but I suspect that some of the males and females at Friday’s Salsa by the Bay either danced with people they knew, or with strangers, and went home and put their bodies even more closely together than they did while the band had blared and its members repeatedly and characteristically sang “Bai-le! Bai-le!”

Such unions often occur in the post-dance darkness. I speak from some experience here. When they do, even more microbes are exchanged. Oh, the humanity!

On this germy theme, some officials who demanded that everyone quarantine themselves were caught having extramarital affairs during the lockdowns. New York City’s “Covid Czar” admitted that he participated in orgies. To civilians who didn’t already know that officials were playing them, such arrogant conduct should have underscored how phony the Covid response was.

If disease statistics are ever again to be believed, STD rates dipped for a few months in March-June 2020. Some attributed this to decreased testing. Regardless, thereafter, these rates continued their years of increase, especially among gay males. STD rates among that demographic far outnumber those among the general populace.

Public health officials selectively tolerate health risk, based on political correctness. If public health officials really want to crush infectious diseases, why don’t they police-tape the doors on gay bars?

They might say that doing so wouldn’t stop such interaction; sex seekers, gay or straight, will just default to hook-up websites. Though just as Covid dissidents’ messages were censored as “misinformation,” public health officials could block internet hook-up sites “to advance the public interest.” Why don’t they apply, to STDs, the core Covid Era principle that any intervention is “worth it, if it just saves one life?”

For that matter, how did a government that not only endorses but profits from sales of alcohol, tobacco and now, marijuana, justify locking down, masking, testing and injecting an entire society when only the old and baseline unhealthy were at any— and microscopic—risk?

Those who still think the Covid interventions were driven by the public health concerns of earnest experts should wake up and realize that they fell for a massive lie.

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Public dance can seem silly if you think about it: a bunch of adults moving their bodies frivolously. If only a few people in a given space do this, it seems goofy. But if many join in, collective euphoria can ensue. Rocking to the infectious, often-loud beat among others who are also caught up in the moment can cause participants to suspend reality and stop thinking. In a good way.

The Scamdemic caused many people to suspend reality and stop thinking. In a bad way. While riding a wave of collective enthusiasm in a lively dance setting can strengthen participants’ bodies and hypnotically lift their moods, those entranced by Coronamania succumbed to irrational fear of infection. This yielded inactivity, isolation, depression and broader, lasting forms of damage. Instead of having good memories, as enthralled club or party goers have of various public dance experiences, those who got swept away by the Covid craze now either delusionally act as if The Virus had caused a universally lethal Plague or pretend the Scamdemic never happened.

Hiring the South Street Salsa band was a far better way to use a few thousand public dollars than was spending trillions to produce and buy Covid-terror TV ads and billboards, masks, test kits and shots, et al. Salsa by the Bay was way more genuine than was any of the Coronamanic theater. And unlike the shots, lockdowns, masks and tests, all that twirling and styling was safe and effective.

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Hey, thanks for Liking last week’s post. That wasn’t so hard, was it?