Dancing

I am so glad dancing came back.

I’m not sure about you, but dancing in public in my scene was considered pretty gay for a while. I danced at sleepovers with my girlfriends, and then we started going to punk rock shows. Where we got spit on, just for fun. You don’t dance; you spit on people and smash 40s over their heads. I mean, there was that. There was grunge. There were mosh pits and some crowd surfing, which always ended badly.

Nowadays, many of us who used to headbang are now…well, rocking out at Lipgloss.

By the time dance came back, to me at least, I had forgotten how to dance, and still haven’t quite found it despite my enthusiastic explorations. It was at a Franz Ferdinand show when dance first came back to me. I know, roll your eyes, hipster. Do it!

I saw them at what was probably their last show before they hit it humongous; we hung out with them afterwards. I was a novice music journalist, and just walked up to them and said, “Let’s have an interview.” I didn’t even have a publication. We were getting a drink at the Goosetown across the street so I invited them; when they showed up, I jumped up and gave them hugs, and one of them grabbed my ass. It was admittedly in poor taste for him, but also pretty awesome. To have your ass grabbed by a celebrity.

Then there was this Goosetown regular who was a stripper, and she was really drunk. She passed by them and said, “I likyer shoez!” They were pointy boots. You know. Franz Ferdinand pointy boots. One would think she was saying she liked them, but then she got down on her hands and knees and started licking them. The owner of the pointy shoes, Bob, is blond and looks kind of angelic. He just giggled uncomfortably and said, “Can I get a pho-to of that?” and started snapping photos. I really don’t know how the night degenerated into that. You think I’m making this up, but I’m not.

And that, my friends, is why dancing is great.

So last night we went to a pretty good dance night, another incarnation of Michael Trundle’s (roll your eyes, hipster. Do it!) called Pervert.

We had to go through a writhing, eerie, sensual goth night to get to the back, the Milk Bar, where Michael was DJing with who I’d assume is Rex Buchanan. I hadn’t seen goths like that since high school, it was a pretty amazing display. The entire club seemed to be cloaked in black scarves, darkness, there was slow, dark music, people twisting around, dancing alone, a girl who was rubbing herself up against another girl, who was rubbing up against a wall. It was a girl goths gone wild night.

Then Milk Bar is bright, mod, black and white. When you set your drink down on the fluorescent white counter, it glows. Pervert isn’t like Lipgloss; it seems to be geared towards the dance crowd, with Justice (the climax of the night, I’d say) and harder, more industrial sounds. Even techno! You should have seen us, us cute benevolent indie rock kids, skipping and stomping our chucks amongst the black leather-clad spikey sexy goths.

So because I love dancing so much, I’ve decided to add a photoblog of some of my favorite dancey photos in the Denver scene. Some of them are people I know and some of them aren’t; if your photo is up here and you don’t want it to be, please email me. Most of these are courtesy of our in-house photographers Nina Barry and 28 Deep.