Out on the dancefloor with Anthony, Dave, Annie, Drew and Alice, I noticed that indie rock boys move in a nearly identical fashion (the exceptions being Anthony, who has a bit of the goth left in step from years of frequenting Perversion and Paul, who still lives up to the Go Go Box Whore moniker even when he is dancing to James Brown with his wife and there is not a single go go box in sight). Knock knees. Slide to the side in a slight Pac-Man fashion. Raise foot off ground with bent knee. Keep back stiff. Bend forearm so that wrist and shoulder meet for only a second. Insert an optional circular arm swing. Repeat. Watching the dance spread across the floor as the Smiths played, it seemed as though nearly every guy there was trying desperately not to break out into a Johnny Marr-inspired air guitar routine.
As for myself, I looked like an uptight priss on the floor last night. Baby step left. Baby step right. Blame it on the shoes. I wore these slouchy black boots with heels high enough to raise me above every other person on that dancefloor by at least an inch. I only wore them because they looked good with the dress and because I thought I wasn't going to dance, being a bit tired and having suffered from a nightmarish allergy attack all day. But, Anthony had been going on about the new Hard-Fi cd that he bought while in London and how the tickets for the LA show sold out by the time he was back in town and how it was the best thing he had heard in a long time. How then could I avoid dancing with my friends when Larry played a Hard-Fi track that wasn't "Cash Machine?" But then Hard-Fi turned into Ladytron, which gave way to the Smiths and so on and so forth and I bent my knees and dug the balls of my feet so hard into the floor that it started to hurt in a way that hasn't happened since learning how to hold my balance in dance class decades ago. My eyes grazed the bottom of the room. Plenty of girls were there dancing in shoes either as high or higher than mine and still managed to move with some semblance of poise. Meanwhile, I'm genuflecting on the dancefloor because it's the only way I can teeter on the heels without falling flat on my ass. I should know by now, some people just aren't made for heels.