Dancing it out like Kevin Bacon

If you're like me, you feel secretly resistant when someone wants you to watch a video on YouTube. It doesn't matter that sometimes you want people to watch your funny videos and that many of the videos pressed upon you are totally watch-worthy.

Maybe I'm too used to not getting the joke and part of me lives in fear of my non-reaction. Also those four minutes might be a worthless use of my precious and hilarious time.

I think this fear was born of internet jokes forwarded to me over the years: Of the 3,972 jokes received in my inbox, maybe six of them made me giggle.

Regardless, I'm about to put up another YouTube video. I want you to know, however, that this video is very, very special. Unique and amazing things happen in this video. Especially at :59, 1:32, 1:59, and 2:40.



I woke up this morning demoralized by the light dusting of snow on the ground and thought of this video. There isn't technically enough snow on the ground to restrict me and my movements - that's what winter coats are for and I own several - but just enough to remind me that it's not LA and 72 degrees, where I recently walked to work in a short sleeve shirt.

This warm, pleasant memory made me want to find an empty warehouse where I could smoke, slam a cassette into my tapedeck, repeatedly abuse the steering wheel and hood of my car, and then, in frustration over a repressive John Lithgow and his sexy hard-shelled daughter Lori Singer, break my beer bottle into a hundred shards before DANCING IT OUT like Kevin Bacon.

Footloose was on sale at Blockbuster for $3.99 and there was no talking myself out of it.

It was only my favorite movie in 1984, a fact I made clear at the time by owning the soundtrack, nursing a raging crush on KB, buying the sheet music to the Kenny Loggins hit title song, and learning to play said hit title song on the piano. THEN I bought a bottle of pink puffy paint and imprinted the first few bars of the song onto a t-shirt that I wore proudly to school. In case my message was somehow unclear, I scrawled across the top in pink letters F O O T L O O S E. Third grade cursive style.

I hadn't seen the movie since then. Until two nights ago.

And there's just a few things I want to say:

1. Yes, Matthew, that IS what I hoped and believed high school would be like. Yes, I was disappointed.

2. The words to "Let's Hear It for the Boy" and "Holding Out for a Hero" have been hibernating in my brain for a very long time. I had no idea I could - and would! - still belt it out like that.

3. Kevin Bacon had legitimate moments of badassery in that movie. I understand why he was my first celebrity crush.

4. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut is now my current bedtime book in honor of the scene where Kevin Bacon is on the porch after church with the townspeople and they look at him in hushed horror when he says it's a classic.

5. You're welcome.