What a Feeling!: all Flash, not so much Dance

FLASHES
FIRST, WHEN THERE'S NOTHING BUT A SLOW GLOWING DREAM...

My childhood girlfriends and I loved Flashdance. Still do. Although, I wouldn't dare watch it today because, as a recently disabled person (7 months and counting!), that "feeling" isn't one I'm ready or willing to confront.

In 1983, I was 8 yrs old, and I already knew what I wanted: I was going to be a dancer, and even though I didn't yet know the word choreographer, I was going to make dances and live my life by "the feeling" because there was no better feeling than dancing. Jennifer Beals represented everything my trio of dancing BFFs wanted to be:

Tough as a man by day.
Struggling dance success story by night or by whatever means possible.

And we danced and danced and danced to the Flashdance soundtrack until each of our cassette tapes wore out, and then we went to Monroeville Mall and bought them again.

We could never have too much flash or dance. And if that ain't a universal truth, it damn well should be.

Though we all took different paths in life, and I - probably the least naturally talented dancer of the three of us - did fulfill that childhood dream, we are still BFFs, and, especially in my situation, that's a "feeling" worth dancing about...

Even if it's an awkward, disjointed, cane-dance.
Even if it means a day or two of couch-potato-inducing pain.
Even if it makes me want to cry that each limb and extremity in my body is listening to its own MP3...with headphones.

Think:

Bette Midler meets Marilyn Manson meets Depeche Mode meets Coltrane meets John Zorn meets Stevie Wonder meets Beastie Boys meets Beyoncé meets Barry Manilow (Jewish moms everywhere rejoice!) meets Justin Timberlake meets Liberace (loved him...don't laugh) meets dog barking on street, and you have a....

Transverse Myelitis (TM) body on the dance floor.

Pretty funky, huh? Now that's experimental dance...some things never change after all.



DANCES
I CAN'T HAVE IT ALL, NOW I'M DANCIN' FOR MY LIFE...

Now I'm 33, and over the last four years my body began an escalating rebellion against the "feeling" - that dancing feeling that I, like most dancers, wanted to bottle, pickle, and preserve for eternity.

Instead of spending my days in the studio, cleansing my body with sweat, spirited by the immediate gratification of movement and its endless (but limited) potential, loving (I mean I heart heart heart kind of loving) the process of mind/body discovery, and ultimately sculpting what movement was worth remembering into a dance worthy of a stage, I now spend the majority of my days at home or in the hospital or in a doctor's office, attached to some machine or expectation.

And while this is not a universal truth, it is simply a fact. In other words, it may sound like I'm whining, but I'm not. I assure you.

Do I hate my life? sometimes
Do I hate my body? sometimes
Do I love my body? occasionally, but only because I know I should (happy thoughts people!)
Am I miserable? from time to time
Am I grateful? ditto, but only because I've (been lucky enough???????) to have had "life experiences" that enable me to understand the theory of relativity

And speaking of relativity, I still have one thing in common with the Old Mel Body - we both have/are devoting our lives to pushing through our own physical limitations.


FUNNY FEELINGS
WHAT A FEELING (I AM MUSIC NOW), BEIN'S BELIEVIN' (I AM RHYTHM NOW)

I wake up with pains, I spasm, I tingle (and not the XXX-rating-worthy-tingling-kind-of-tingle), I ache, I burn, I am on fire, I fall, I stumble, I hit my head on toilet seats (thank goodness for good manners), I speak in word stews, I can't tell stories (but I can write them), I get blood-in-the-toilet UTIs because I've lost that lovin' feelin' (tho I haven't lost the love), I leak, I pee in public (yes, I know there's a thing called a bathroom), I have orgasmed over the toilet (gasp!...I am too old to wet the bed), I have skinny legs and arms that hide elephants in them like magic, I put deodorant on 3x in a row (and it's not an OCD thing), I forget the nice things people say, I forget the mean things people say, I forget, I forget, I forget, I have friends that are missing (not everyone knows how to handle the sicko-situation), I take poison upon poison upon poison called hope, I see, I don't see, I see peripheral flashes of bug and snake ghosts dancing past my feet and up my apartment's walls, and...

more often than not, I find this hysterically funny.



I AM LAUGHTER
(BEIN'S BELIEVIN') BEIN'S BELIEVIN'

Even though my latest prescription is Imuran, an immuno-suppressant/low-dose chemo (with quite the list of side effects...oh what a feelin'!) to treat the autoimmune processes that are feeding my TM, even though I may never find a singular rhythm to follow again, even though I'm scared of what will or will not happen:

I heretofore choose laughter as my sole/soul prescription. (And oddly enough, when I'm in the belly of hysterics, laughing at my own nutty neuroisms, my body finds a dance that meets rhythmic logic.)

There. I said it. In legalese, so there's no going back.

Ha!