A few blogs ago I talked about impulse control, and I was thinking about that today when I was in a neighborhood store searching for a greeting card. It’s one of those stores with an excruciatingly groovy counter staff—everyone has at least one tasteful facial piercing (is that an oxymoron? "Tasteful facial piercing"??) and they all wear those big thick-framed black glasses through which they gaze at the customers in utter dispassion. The store merchandise is unique and arranged cleverly, and there isn’t much of it. T-shirts featuring clever little ironic messages, retro teapots, a few toys, exotic candles, some jewelry. There’s no real theme, unless it’s Stuff You Would Never, Ever Buy for Yourself Because It’s Too Expensive and You’re Not Even Sure What It’s For But It Makes a Great Gift if You're Desperate.
They always have great cards, though.
Anyway…so I was poking through the cards and milling about with a few other serious-looking adults all of whom no doubt also had gift-seeking objectives, when the song that was playing over the sound system when I entered the store—a strummy acoustic guitar, a sighing female vocal, barely a song at all— sort of ebbed away and then stopped.
A moment of near total silence followed.
And then suddenly, like a rain of hard superballs, the opening guitar lick of “Play that Funky Music, White Boy” bounced of out of the speakers.
And it was hilarious. Because it’s nearly impossible to hear that song and not move at least a little. And all the solemn adults who were picking up teapots and sniffing candles around me started to sort of…twitch. One guy tapped his foot and seemed to be pretending he wasn’t doing it. But then he did it again…and again. A woman near me began to sort of furtively finger-drum her thigh. I noticed another woman almost gingerly bobbing her head to the music, carefully not meeting anyone’s eyes. And frankly, I was sort of dying to just burst out into a full-on funky dance. I’m willing to bet everyone in that store felt the same way. Our bodies, our reflexes were probably silently screaming, “What is the matter with you?? Dance, you fool, dance!” I mean, dancing would have made sense, from a reflex perspective. That’s what that particular song is for. We would have all done it in our homes, I’m betting. Instead, we were behaving in a civilized manner, and repressing all of our instincts.
I amused myself by imagining grabbing the guy next to me and launching into The Bump, and then everyone else would just cut loose and we would all dance like maniacs in public, around the ironic t-shirts and teapots, for the duration of the song, and then resume our solemn gift searches. What if life was like that? Like an episode of Fame, or something??
Of course, there are excellent reasons for impulse control, because it helps us tell the truly crazy from the not crazy. For example, I had a seat on a crowded bus one day when I noticed this guy standing in the aisle: tall, curly hair, nice fisherman’s sweater. Cute, I thought. I smiled a little…and he smiled a little…and then he abruptly reached up for the overhead bar with both hands and began swinging from it like a monkey while making loud trumpet noises with his mouth to the tune of the 1812 Overture. In other words, he was nutty as a fruitcake. There’s usually one genuinely nutty person per bus in San Francisco.
Ah, well. I mostly confine my dancing to home these days, in my office, to the world's most random songs.
Do any of you out there like to dance? Do you do it in public, at weddings, at a club, only at home, never?? What kind of stuff do you like to dance to? Is there a song that gets you going every single time?
