Learning to Dance
Published by Chris July 21st, 2009 in Uncategorized.
Trumansburg, NEW YORK –8:45 a.m. Friday found me waiting for the shuttle bus to the GrassRoots Festival of Music and Dance. This was my first year, and after having a great time Thursday, I wanted to make the most of the remaining three days. It seemed too early for pretty much everyone, except for the guy in a shirt proclaiming the greatness of the Pythagorean Theorem. He’ was holding a can of PBR and eating an orange slice. It’s 5:00 somewhere, and at that point, that somewhere happened to be simultaneously Kabul and Trumansburg.
The shuttle pulled up and a few bleary-eyed travelers stumbled out. We boarded the shuttle, which still looked and smelled fresh, despite being in service since noon yesterday. These buses run 24 hours a day throughout the festival, transporting excited fans to the festival to return them drunk, tired and ready for bed. Some are still excited.
Overheard on the bus:
Girl: How did you sleep?
Friend: Great. I passed right out last night.
Girl: What time did you get back?
Friend: Around 2, I think, how about you?
Girl: Around 4 or 5.
It didn’t look like the tiredness had hit her yet, but this was only the beginning of day two of a four-day festival. There was a lot more music to listen to, many more dances to be danced.
Shows didn’t start until around 11, but I caught yoga, led by local teacher Diane Fine, to recover from yesterday’s festivities and center myself before today’s.
I made a promise to myself. Today I would learn to dance. I’d written an article on dancing at GrassRoots for the Ithaca Times, but am not much of a dancer myself. In fact, my dancing “style” could probably be reproduced quite faithfully by moving a cardboard cutout of myself side to side on a dance floor. It’s not that I don’t like dancing; it’s just that I’m shy and never learned how. So maybe yoga could help me find the courage for it.
I’m about as skilled at dancing as I am at Yoga, and find it at times physically distressing but overall very calming when done on a mat. When done on a wood dance floor, it is mostly physically distressing, especially when kneeling. But there is still a calming and centering element to it.
“The conscious mind might be wandering to the outside and the people watching,” Fine warned. “Acknowledge what the mind is saying and then let it go.” I did. Maybe it’s something I picked up rowing, but I was able to block out the idea that somebody might be watching me folded up like the Pretzel Kama Sutra.
When Fine began quoting people like Jack Kornfield and Julia Butterfly, I thought, “these names are too perfect – she has to be making this up.” Then I remembered to center myself and forget my conscious mind. But somewhere in the back of my mind I stored that bit of information away. Later, I discovered she was not making those names up after all.
Julia Butterfly Hill is an environmentalist who spent a year and a half in a tree in an attempt to prevent the Pacific Lumber Company from felling trees in California. According to Fine, Butterfly experienced a storm in “Luna,” as her tree was called, and found herself holding on for dear life as it swayed back and forth. Then she heard the tree whispering to her to look at all the other trees that were swaying as well, that she too should move with them; that would be the safest way. By moving like all the other trees, by going with their flow rather than rigidly clinging to what felt safe, she was protected and was able to calm herself.
I tucked the message away for later.
Jack Kornfield, I discovered afterward, is an American Buddhist monk. His message, as relayed by Fine, was to “imagine every place, in this case, GrassRoots, as your neighborhood. What is your purpose in this neighborhood?” This question was starting to get me unfocused, so I took Fine’s advice that every inhale is a chance to start new,” and stored post-its in a dark corner of my subconscious to later look up this “Cornfield” character (as I thought his name was spelled) and to search my soul for what I was actually doing here at GrassRoots.
After yoga I found myself at local favorite The Rozatones, where I was really enjoying the music before I remembered the promise I had made myself. I dragged myself to the dance tent for a square dance with the Chicken Fried String Band.
While there were quite a few veterans at the square dance, I was happy to discover there were many amateurs as well. I was not so happy to discover that all of them were in my square. At least we’d be in this together, and no matter how bad it got, we could at least still revel in each other’s ineptness.
I was fascinated by the couple comprising side three of our square. I didn’t catch their names, but if I had to guess I’d say Ethel and Joe. If the year were 1973, Ethel and Joe would have married before the war and afterwards settled down to have kids. After their kids headed off to college in 1966 and 1969, Ethel went back to her job as a school teacher while Joe continued his job at the factory, coming home every night for dinner at five o’clock, somehow managing to expand his belly while his wife remained miraculously thin. Despite this, the two resembled each other in a, “I’ve-lived-with-you-nearly-thirty-years” sort of way: both with dyed dark hair, dark eyes, and thick black-framed glasses. They were also both clad in pink– his shirt tie-dyed to keep just barely behind the times.
Of course, the year was 2009 and I actually didn’t find out their names as they tried to introduce themselves over the noise of the band:
Ethel: I’m ___ and my __band’s name ___ _______.
Me: I’m sorry, what was that? The band’s too loud.
Ethel: Me too!
I was partnered with Sarah, a young woman with a cheerful demeanor. Watch out, I haven’t square danced since third grade gym class, I told her.
“That’s okay,” she said, blue eyes sparkling. The music started up. “But I had danced contra,” she added coyly.
Swings, allemandes and do-si-dos came back to me as we moved in time to Chicken Fried. Actually, moving in time grants us a sort of grace that we actually did not possess. Rather, our square tried its hardest to complete every call on time, playing catch-up through the entire dance and pushing Joe along, who apparently had never square danced before. We were failing at “ducking for oysters” and “diving for clams” but having a great time doing it, everyone in the square laughing at our own incompetence.
After three or four dances our square broke up and I resumed my journalistic duties of snapping pictures for the festival. “You cut a mean rug,” my editor joked as I walked off the floor. Cutting rugs – I was heading Diane Fine’s advice to let go. It didn’t matter what anyone else thought of me – they weren’t dancing.
Next up in the dance tent was Preston Frank and his Zydeco Family Band. I love listening to zydeco music, but had never danced to it before. I knew it involved a lot of foot movement; something I doubted I’d be ready for. Luckily, very few people were zydeco dancing. Most were just moving to the beat. I started to lapse into my old dance moves before remembering the story of Julia Butterfly. I began to sway and gyrate with everyone else. Yeah, it’ll be all right. Just move along with us. And it was all right. And I couldn’t stop smiling.
I wandered around for the rest of the afternoon, stopping to see Mac and the Trucks, the Makepeace Brothers, Keith Secola, Walter Mouton, Mutron Wariors and Mountain Heart. GrassRoots presented a smorgasbord of music, and (to mix the metaphor), I was stuffing my ears. But soon it was 8:00 and time to stuff my face with the other smorgasbord. Chinese, Indian, New York Italian, American, vegetarian, Mediterranean!? This is not a festival for the indecisive.
By the time I finished dinner the ambience had changed from festival to carnival. The food tents lit up like a midway as a younger clientele flooded the infield for Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings and the grandstands for the Sim Redmond Band. Alcohol had flowed all day, and a good amount of weed was smoked as well, but nothing prepared me for the amount of grass that was being packed and rolled all around me. A good article for the future might trace the origins of all the marijuana at Grass Roots and estimate how much is consumed.
Nothing could have prepared me, the sober person at the party, for the crowd at John Brown’s Body. Pipes, bongs, blunts, joints surrounded me. I was in the dead center of a sea of people, floating maybe 20 feet from the stage. Here people did not dance so much as groove with the rhythm. Really, though, that’s all one could do. And the whole time there was that smoke on the water – puffs ascending from the swaying masses.
At that point I was a little loopy from being up all day, and all that smoke really was not helping me. A combination of the two, in fact, was making me really paranoid. What follows is a highly-accurate recreation of my thought process:
Jesus, that beach ball’s getting close again – I hope it doesn’t get any closer than that. I really with they’d stop hitting – FUCK! – that was close. Hopefully someone will pop it and I won’t have to deal with this anymore.
Wait, where’d the ball go? The ball, the ball, the ball – there it is! SHIT! [I flail a the ball, missing] Oh shit, I can’t take this anymore.
Yes, two beach balls had actually distracted me from what I’m sure was a stunning performance by JBB. So I waded out of the crowd, slowly, not wanting to bother anyone. I’m sure they didn’t mind. As I made my way out, pot-consumption decreased, but the level of intoxication remained roughly the same, peaking at the very fringe where a man was drinking straight from a liquor bottle and dancing wildly with three glowsticks, wishing everyone a happy GrassRoots.
I felt better by the time I made it back to the dance tent, where the Pine Leaf Boys were playing till the break of dawn. Though not a dancer, I love live Cajun music, and the Pine Leaf Boys had a great energy that would propel me through at least another two hours.
Here I danced till my legs were sore and my eyes were dropping. 2:30 was my magic number – I’d been at the festival for over 15 hours.
I had a great time at GrassRoots, let loose with the dancing, and gotten some decent pictures for my assignment. I didn’t make it back the next day, sleeping it away and missing Bela Fleck, one of my all-time favorite performers. I promised myself, however, that I’d make it back Sunday.
I now understood the weariness I’d seen that morning, and I wonder if/how those people made it through the day. Sleep, drugs, and rock & roll – a nice four-day break from reality.
Jack Kornfield would have me state my purpose at the festival. For myself, it was fulfilled: I danced like I never have before. As for my purpose in the festival community, I hadn’t done a whole lot. So maybe my purpose is to act as a messenger: life’s too short to not go to GrassRoots.
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