I'm going to guess that there are a few of you out there - although I actually have very little sense about who sees this stuff - who recall a time when I was romantically entangled with a dancer and costumiere named Angela. Unquestionably one of the most creative people I have ever met, she will forever be represented in my mind by a single piece she did called "the danger dance." An interpretive dancer by training, she used to perform at this open mic thing called the Wide Open Floor, and one night she danced on this really precarious stack of objects - chairs and blocks and whatnot - playing with how she could move right there at the edge of causing the whole thing to come crashing down. The audience was totally silent, as I recall, and I don't really remember breathing while her dance was going on.
We'd fallen out of contact over this past year, and the last time I saw her was at her wedding - which was the first wedding of someone I'd been involved with that I had been to (a very odd experience, to be sure). Subsequently, she moved to Tennesee and opened a bakery with her husband. Well, I got a message today from her, and it seems the danger dancer has had herself a baby boy!
I'm telling you this perhaps in large part because it's 6 o'clock on a sunday morning and I'm still awake and thinking about how the exemplar of youthful daring goes from dancing precariously on the edge with a sort of morbid curiousity to settling down and having a baby (which, of course, has new dangers, but certainly not the same kind). It happened, this change, and I see it now happening to other peers of mine. One of my friends owns a house. Somehow it has come to be that If I were asked to list words to characterize my closest friends, one of the first words would be "responsible."
It creeps in on you, I guess. Am I next? Am I behind the curve already? How many days remain for yours truly to go to sleep unable to remember where I've left my pants? How much would the circus have to offer me today to run away, and how much six months from now?
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4 comments:
don't worry, i rarely know where my pants are these days (although for perhaps different reasons than i had 4 years ago) and i certainly wouldn't consider myself "responsible," at least not until a few more years go by. we've got time.
by the way, i miss you...
Aren't you about to get a Masters from NYU? And aren't you employed in the burgeoning field of "science?" Don't you wear a tie more often than not?
Sounds pretty responsible to me. It's not like you're drunk in a ditch somewhere. Unless you are, in which case, do you want company?
A tie is less impressive if you aren't wearing pants.
Andrew and I had fun tumbling on your left over mattresses yesterday, and then I ate more rhurbarb and watched 21 jumpstreet. Take that, growing up!
I say, if a person plays their cards right, they will never completely grow up. At least that's my goal. "Responsible" is another thing. And you have been responsible in many ways almost since the day you were born.
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