Things that make you go hmmmmmmm.......

I attempted to go dancing last night. I love dancing, many kinds, although I'm referring in this instance specifically to club dancing; it brings out my inner (maybe not so inner) Diva and allows me to have my own little performance--even for just myself--over on a corner of the dance floor.

Little did I know it was 80's night at the club, and it all went to hell, quickly.

Now, I have a moderate fondness for 80's music (although it amazes me that, already, lots of the old videos and songs that informed my teen years are now referred to as "retro" or "classic" or "vintage," which makes me feel like a wizened old 20's flapper spinning prohibition yarns, or a stern, aged face in a sepia photograph, or, shit, a Model T Ford) but I can't dance to a lot of it.

Obviously, clubs have taken this into consideration, so they're not playing the actual old "vintage" radio versions of the songs themselves to which I dreamed and hummed and bopped along in the safety of my teenaged bedroom, no. They're spinning 80's chestnuts like John Cougar Mellencamp's "Jack & Diane" but remixed and set to a techno beat.

I cannot begin to emphasize enough just how wrong, in so many ways, this is.

I am aware that clubs love putting everything under the sun to a techno beat and calling it dance music (hello, Titanic.) If there's a beat, there's sure to be an ass--or two or three (goes the thinking, as there were last night a few enthusiastic straight couples working out what is probably an otherwise seriously repressed and rather vanilla eros in front of God and the DJ and a bunch of Queens, since this was, after all, a gay club) out on the dance floor.

This get-'em-out-there theory, in all its lame glory, failed last night.

I was one less ass out on the dance floor. I couldn't--wouldn't--move it to a badly misguided remix of Heart's "Barracuda." And, I mean, it's a hard song for me to like in the first place, although I don't dislike Heart at all; I'm impressed by the Wilson sisters and their kick-ass vocals. But remixed? So, so wrong.

So there I sat on the periphery of the dance floor at a table with a couple other similarly unimpressed friends listening to one uninspiring 80's remix after another. Even Dee-Lite wasn't enough to coax the Diva out, so we finally ditched the scene and, channeling my best Liza Minnelli, dropped in on the Portland Gay Men's Chorus cast party which was happening at a restaurant across the street.

If there was a positive outcome to all of this, it's that I downloaded the Tom Tom Club's "Genius of Love" the next morning. Not cause--blessedly--this one had been set to a dance beat, but because we'd heard it earlier while eating sushi, and I remembered that--vintage or not--I like it.