Feminism in the Club

  Paul Oakenfold is coming on at Lizard Lounge. I can't believe i spent a hundred bucks getting here. I can't believe I'm liking it. He spreads his arms like a Christ figure, the crowd responds like he is.

  An hour later, two hours? We are all caught up in the music. I am saying nothing, only looking up from my little piece of dance floor to make eye contact with my buddies and nod as if to say "hell yeah." At the begining of the night all the girls looked cool in their towering heels and short dresses. Now i look cooler than cool in flat boots. I'm wearing a tank top your grandpa would wear, pretending its a dress.

  They are pulling the bottles now and I am sad to see it go but only a little. I feel the pulse of the music, up through the balcony floor and into my feet. We don't mourn the death of drinking; all at once we grab the table and the odd choice of chairs and we pull them back from the rail. We dance, over looking the pit below and the wasted girls looking at their clumsy hands in the air and the dudes that don't do anything but shake their fists.

  I am doing the go go dancers rest step, back and forth as i get ready to pick it up again and surveying my kingdom. I am thinking thats its our job, to look over this club and dance on this rail so that they can look up and see us and long to be where we are.

  Beside me on my left there is a girl. I am observing her without admitting to noticing her. She's wearing a funky tee shirt and jeans and heels. She is dancing on the rail too and we are pretending not to see each other. On and on we dance, next to each other, in our own little world. On my right my friend is in his own world too, and maybe we exchange glances, but really we are all absorbed in the sort of ironic silence of music you can't speak over.

  Step step step step step.. hand on the rail, hands in the air, both hands on the rail, hands at my side when its all about the hips and the feet and still she and I ignore each other. And then she bumps me. or I bump her. We are startled enough to look at each other, forgetting to pretend it didn't happen. I could eye her up. I could give her the cold look of measuring or I could look at her awkwardly apologetically. But I don't. Maybe its the handful of drinks circulating around my veins, or maybe my mind is just extra clear in this moment and I am less hesitant than usual.

 I look up at her and grin, as if we are conspirators in some wild adventure. She grins. We go back to our own dancing, but both of us caught up more this time. Our steps get bigger. As she ceases to give token recognition to the guy behind her, I get the whim to step back. I let her move into my spot on the rail and I step back out of the view of the world and into the shadows of people taller than me. I finish the night dancing there until we are leaving in a whirl of exiting before the over packed house spins out around us. We don't even manage to say by to the entire group as the loud silence of being enveloped by music turns to the excited chatter of the parking lot. I am walking with my friend and the one I love as they smoke and I smile and we rehash the ride that isn't yet quite over.

 My friend is telling me how brilliant the night was and the ride that it was in the way that he can say it and make you say "yeah man!" with every fiber of your being.. but I can only try to repeat it and make it sound dumb. "Even that chick, that chick!" he is saying, "the one that danced next to me, she felt it too, she was fuckin cool." And I laugh, because the moment in time that just happened for him happened because the choice I made in a moment let it.