Dance Like Everybody’s Watching

Audio version now available.

Confidence comes from doing the things that require a little liquid courage without the liquid courage.

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How do you know if you need a few drinks to talk to women when every time you are in a situation conducive to initiating a conversation with the opposite sex that situation carries with it an expectation of alcohol consumption? I don’t remember needing liquid courage when I was a drinker, but I also don’t remember socializing sober.

I’m an extrovert. I like talking to people, female or otherwise. Now that I’ve been married for most of my life, and there is only one pair of pants I am trying to get into, there is no social lubricant needed for me to talk to anyone of any sex. I suppose I’d be a little nervous if I was talking to Tina Fey, but that’s because she’s the funniest woman alive and not because I’m attracted to her (which I am). There is a professor from grad school who intimidates me, but not because she’s attractive (which she is), but because she’s way, way smarter than me. It’s not a good idea to drink to dull my senses when talking to people who are naturally sharper than me. Unless I want to significantly shorten the conversation.

I don’t need liquid courage to do anything, really. I speak in public. I wear ridiculous costumes for Halloween. I wear ridiculous costumes when it is not Halloween. I introduce myself at parties and dinners, which can be a little awkward when I try to shake a stranger’s hand in the men’s room. The only thing commonly associated with alcohol that I don’t do sober is dance.

Well…that’s not entirely true.

I’ve taken swing dancing lessons with my wife, and that went OK. She prefers to honor the traditional gender roles where the man leads, but she likes to tell me how to lead, which feels a little like she’s leading. Or at least she’s leading me how to lead. In any event, we seem to have lost the enthusiasm. We say we are busy, but I think it’s probably more because we aren’t getting any better. A cool thing about the swing-dance community is that almost nobody drinks alcohol, so it is a sobriety-friendly environment. Unfortunately, it is not a I-can’t-think-about-my-feet-and-arms-at-the-same-time-friendly community.

When I say I don’t dance now that I’m sober, I am talking about the kind of dancing that differentiates a bar from a club. I’ve been to hundreds of bars, but I wouldn’t set foot in a club if they paid me – an offer that I’ve never been forced to decline (I think the disdain is mutual – most clubs aren’t looking for more patrons proficient in the white-man’s overbite with a vague recollection of how to do the “Electric Slide”).

So when my wife, my kids, and I boarded the plane for my nephew’s wedding in Charlotte last month, my dancing shoes were not in my luggage. I planned to talk, laugh, eat, and hug relatives I only see on such rare and festive occasions. Dancing actually never occured to me. I am not naive about the normal course of post-nuptial events. Although it had been decades since I last attended a wedding, in our twenties, my wife and I had a few summers where weddings dominated our social calendar. We once attended a Friday night wedding in Saint Paul, and a Saturday afternoon wedding in Indianapolis, with a sleepless-night’s drive in-between. I barely drank at all Friday night, but more than made up for it on Saturday getting so drunk that I tried to jump over a table full of hors devours. I cleared the table, but not the food, and left my wife wishing she’d dumped my body in Lake Michigan as we took a right-hand turn in Chicago.

I knew dancing was a foundational element of any standard American wedding. I had never wedding danced sober, and didn’t think much about it as we traveled to Charlotte. I suppose I thought I would just talk and eat cake and let the drinkers flail around on the dance floor. It wasn’t a cause for anxiety. I don’t share a bloodline with Shakira or Bruno Mars, so I wasn’t anticipating a lot of social pressure to shake what the good lord gave me. I was more nervous about snapping at my family out of sleep-deprived irritation while catching our 7am flight the morning after the wedding. Dancing just wasn’t on my radar.

So imagine my surprise when my twenty-three-year-old daughter insisted that I dance with her. My relationship with my eldest has been tenuous in recent years. I have a natural tendency to offer advice, and she has a natural tendency to prefer to have her toenails extracted by pliers than to hear my unsolicited opinions. Given our stages in life, I don’t think the incompatibility is uncommon. But in our case, my daughter was aware and impacted by my alcoholism more than her younger siblings, and that has exacerbated our struggle to find peaceful contentment in our relationship. So in the interest of finding the harmony with my firstborn that I long for, when she grabbed my arm and dragged me to the last place in Charlotte that I wanted to be – the dance floor – I did not resist.

It helped that she dragged her brothers out there, too. Her mom didn’t really need any encouragement to join us. My wife loves to dance, especially when we are group dancing to fast wedding songs where there is no risk of me trying to lead her in an inside turn.

The DJ did his best to keep everyone dancing. As people from my generation and older drifted off the dance floor, he transitioned from multi-generational wedding staples like “Shout” and “YMCA” to songs I could not name, but that elicited positive reactions from the wedding party and the rest of the twenty-somethings. My daughter kept leading our little family dance circle, so I kept dancing, grateful for her enthusiasm for my presence.

Then something unexpected happened. If I were more of a cheesy, Hallmark-movie-sort-of-a writer, I might use a cringey word like, “magical.” I started really loving dancing. It transcended really loving the connection with my daughter. I wasn’t a good dancer. But I think I moved mostly in rhythm, and I bounced and gyrated and spun and hopped and only occasionally whacked a bridesmaid with a flailing arm. It was super fun. I kind of lost consciousness and forgot that people could see me. I’ve been blackout drunk many times, but this was my first experience with being blackout groovin’. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know the songs, I shout-sang gibberish lyrics anyway. The wedding party even insisted that I solo in the middle of their dance circle where one person is featured at a time (I am sure there is a much more hip way to describe that, probably starting by using a less outdated word than hip). I barely stopped for water, and I think the dehydration enhanced the transcendence of the experience.

Eventually, I did become aware of something that struck me, in the moment, as fascinating. Totally fascinating, and at first, I did not know what to make of it.

There were a lot of people staring at me.

It wasn’t my immediate family. The five people I love most in the world were sweating and rocking out with me. It was cousins and aunts and uncles and strangers from the bride’s side of the family. It was fellow wedding attendees from my generation and older with whom I had exchanged comments during the cocktail hour and dinner about how beautiful the bride was and how creative and genuine my nephew’s vows were. At first, I worried that they were pitying me for making a fool of myself. I later heard, in fact, that my cousin (with whom I share a similar sense of humor) referred to me as our family’s requisite creepy uncle. I wasn’t trying to brush bridesmaids’ boobs, so I took no offense from his characterization.

Why are they staring at me? Am I that bad? The wedding party seemed genuine in their enthusiasm as they included my family of six into their “Shut Up and Dance” circle. Every time I look up at the people standing and sitting just off the dance floor, someone is staring at me. What are they looking at?

The wedding’s officiant was an uncle of the bride. Before the dancing started, I introduced myself as an uncle of the groom, and told him how much I appreciated his emphasis on emotional safety (not in those same words, but with the same intent) during his charge to the newlyweds. It was a cordial and authentic exchange between strangers with a mutual interest in the success of a new marriage. Now, late into the evening, I found the same man I had never met until a couple of hours prior staring at me and moving toward me during a transition between songs. “Hey!” he shouted over the music. “Stop dancing! You are making the rest of our generation look bad as we watch you go while we are all out of steam.” He smiled. I smiled. My daughter pulled my arm, and we were back bouncing as the lights flashed and the bass thumped.

They weren’t looking at me because I looked ridiculous. They were looking at me because as bad as I was at dancing, I was doing something they couldn’t. For some, the limitation was physical. We had been going nonstop for a couple of hours, and that takes a toll – a toll my body is much better equipped for now that I don’t pour a toxin down my throat. For others, the limitation was mental. I think the open bar had closed up shop, and without a consistent source of social lubrication, dancing in public to unfamiliar music was too daunting.

Confidence comes from doing the things that require a little liquid courage without the liquid courage.

I didn’t care what anyone in that room, except for my wife and kids, thought about me. I just didn’t. That is a plane of confidence that was unavailable to me as a drinker – drunk, buzzed, or sober. It was a transcendent moment for sure. But it turns out that the transcendence didn’t happen that night on the dance floor. It wasn’t magic. It was the result of almost a decade of hard work of navigating life without a crutch, and basking in the glory of all that an untoxicated life has to offer.

I only slept for a couple of hours that night. It takes a while to unwind from a transcendent experience. It also took a while to rehydrate and stop sweating. My family and I were, in fact, a little snippy with each other running on fumes the next day. But we stopped long enough to take a picture of the sun rising over Charlotte as we walked across a skybridge from the rental car return into the airport. You might see one of those charming vacation photos people share on social media – smiling faces without the honest vulnerability of the back story. In the case of this picture, now you know the back story. I can’t speak for my family, but I can assure you that the photographer’s smile was genuine.

If you are ready to pursue the confidence that comes from doing the things that require a little liquid courage without the liquid courage, please consider joining us in SHOUT Sobriety.

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