Alison McGhee's Blog, page 33

And on the 30th day, she looked forward to Indian food with a friend.

I was in the laundry room, folding mounds of towels and sheets and listening to one of my favorite doctor-writers, Atul Gawande.

Mr. Gawande was talking about how he recently spent time comparing operating room procedures to kitchen procedures at The Cheesecake Factory. He was impressed with the fact that within weeks, all the items on a brand-new Cheesecake Factory menu had been memorized, mastered and turned into an instinctive, practiced set of skilled motions by each of the Cheesecake Factory chefs nationwide. (I’m paraphrasing, but this is how I understood it.)

I listened carefully to everything he said, because I love Atul Gawande. He’s the guy who, years ago, wrote an article that entranced me. This article still entrances me –I still read it over and over– with everything that it has to say about how an ordinary person can get really, really good at something.

Becoming good at something, no, not good, great at something is not, according to Mr. Gawande, dependent on talent so much as a combination of endless practice, endless striving, a refusal to set a limit on yourself, and something else that I think of as an intuitive leap.

You trudge, you trudge, you trudge, you make miniscule progress that you can barely measure, you grow discouraged and disheartened, and then one day you wake up and poof!, you’ve vaulted onto a whole new plane of existence.

Listening to Atul Gawande talk about how the Cheesecake Factory kitchen is highly organized in terms of quality control, with an overseer who checks every single plate as it leaves the chef line, correcting the chef for every tiny aspect of the dish that’s not perfect, which results in incredibly fast mastery of each dish, made me think of another article he wrote a few years ago, about appendices and where to get them taken out.

The best place to get your appendix removed, as it turns out, is not the hospital with the most brilliant surgeons on staff. Nope. If you want your appendix taken out, you should go to a clinic that does nothing but take appendices (appendixes?) out, one after another, dozens and dozens a day, by surgeons who do nothing but take out little diseased appendixes.

When I got my eyeballs fried I went to a doctor who does nothing but fry eyeballs, day in and day out, dozens a day. He’s an eyeball-frying robot and he does a great job, at least in part because the operation is so utterly familiar.

When I studied Chinese I spent hours forming characters over and over and over and over and over, one to each little box on the character-practice sheets. I don’t write Chinese anymore, but sometimes, if I need to calm down, I’ll sit and trace certain beloved characters over and over and over until the rhythm once again becomes automatic.

I think that great writing –great art, maybe– is a combination of a practice so ingrained and so familiar that it’s in your bones, along with a longing for, what, transcendence?, and an undying push toward perfection.

That perfection can’t be attained doesn’t make any difference. You just keep trying. The trying itself, along with the longing and the practice, will, eventually and often when you least expect it, vault you into a new level of mastery.

When it comes to writing, I’m pretty sure I know what I’m good at, and I also know what I’m bad at. (I see no reason why we shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition; my apologies.)

Most of the time, I choose to focus on what I’m good at and camouflage, distract from, hide, or eliminate what I’m bad at.

Listening to Atul Gawande talk gave me the idea for my final never done before challenge of the month: Identify an aspect of writing that I’m bad at, and get better at it. Do this by devising a process that combines rote practice with the possibility of a serendipitous Darwinian leap.

So, that’s what I’ll be doing this coming month. I’ve identified something specific I’m bad at and I’ll be working on it every day for at least ten minutes.

You’ll have to trust me on that, though, because the official part of the Never Done Before challenge is, as of today, OVER.

I began the challenge on my birthday, one month ago today, in a what-the-hell mood following the consumption of both a Sidecar and an Aviation at Jax Cafe in northeast Minneapolis.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, in a what the hellish sort of way. And despite the fact that I had no idea how much time it would end up taking, it still seems like a good idea. I’m glad I did it, dead mouse detonation and all. Thanks.

Day Twenty-Nine: “Just pretend you stepped on a chicken wing,” said my friend. “Little crunchy bones, you know?”

Well, well, well. I had such a great thing planned for today’s never done before challenge. I was thinking about this great thing all day long, preparing to put in a couple of hours writing about it tonight.

Then I went down into my basement, which, just to give you a visual, is a really nice, finished, furnished, can-lights-in-ceiling, nice bathroom, bamboo-floor-with-rugs-here-and-there basement, to get some books.

As I was looking up at the bookshelves, I stepped on something on one of the rugs that gave under my heel with a distinct *pop*. The sole of my foot felt wet and gunky. I looked down –huge, huge mistake– to see that I had just exploded the skull and bowels of a dead mouse with my bare foot.

You might wonder about the sequence of events that followed this incident.

It’s kind of a blur in my mind, but I know that it involved shrieking on one foot into the laundry room, throwing my leg into the laundry sink, flooding the contaminated foot with a fire hydrant’s worth of water, then –for reasons I don’t understand– scrubbing the foot back and forth in cat litter, returning the foot to the laundry tub, and, finally, realizing that I was stuck with the burst-mouse foot and that like it or not it (the foot) was going to stay attached to my leg for the rest of my life.

I can honestly say that I have never exploded the skull and body of a dead mouse with my bare foot before. And that, my friends, is going to have to suffice for today’s challenge.

I leave you with this fatbooth photo.

Goodnight.

Day Twenty-Eight: Ashamed to admit it

It’s been a long day, and my challenge –to learn how to hula hoop at long last– was completely thwarted by the fact that the only hula hoop in the house, the one that I’ve tried and failed many times to hula with, was apparently constructed for a toddler.

When I went to research the art of hula hooping this morning, preparatory to mastering it, I immediately ran across a website run by a very stern woman who informed me that it’s essential to buy the right size hula hoop, and that “the kind of hula hoops you can buy at Target” are way too small. Oops.

Who knew that I was supposed to have a hula hoop that, when stood on its side, comes up above my belly button? Not me. And I didn’t feel like heading out and trying to procure a regulation-size hula hoop today.

So the dog and I have just returned from a long walk, during which I was determined to do something new. There was a trail of brightly-colored gummy worms all the way down Dupont Avenue, and I thought of photographing them, but that seemed lame.

I’m tired. Sometimes you just don’t want to do anything new, you know? Sometimes you just want to go lie on your couch and listen to music and try once again to get into Wolf Hall, the novel that everyone but you seems to have no problem not only getting into but understanding without a flow chart. Nay, not only understanding without a flow chart, but loving to obsession.

The dog and I were only a few blocks from home, getting ready to cross the street, when we saw a nun on the other side of Dupont about a block away. There was something about this nun that gave me the willies. I don’t have anything against nuns, nor against clowns for that matter (why does everyone hate clowns these days), but my radar went up.

As the nun got closer I saw that she wasn’t a nun. She was a woman with long black hair wearing a pitch-black, long, swirling cape-robe. It’s close to 90 degrees out, but there she was, walking down the street with a big black bag clutched to her side.

And I’m ashamed to admit this, but all I could think of was that movie theater in Aurora and that high school in Columbine, and the black-robed gunmen. I told myself not to be ridiculous, that my neighborhood is full of people who wear anything they want and that’s part of the reason why I love it.

But still, I stood there watching the woman in the swirling black robe. Crossing the street would have meant walking right past her.

I didn’t cross the street. I turned and walked in the other direction. And so far as I can remember, that’s the first time I’ve done something like that.

Day Twenty-Seven: We enter an unfamiliar world

Last evening, led by my youthful companions, who know that my hatred of shopping is outweighed only by my love of spending time with them, I entered a never-done-before alternate world.

In this alternate world, I observed many things, such as bureaus hung on walls three stories high, giant signs which admonished us ominously to “get a cart” because we would “need one,” and an enormous escalator lifting countless passengers skyward.

Huge blue and yellow bags were seen everywhere in this world, and lo, huge carts were pushed grimly through mazelike aisles.

A caged chair was observed to be undergoing what looked like a crude form of electroshock therapy.

Giant bins were filled with things so cheaply priced that we began to feel panicky, as if we should buy them all if only because of their absurd cheapness.

Many conversations were overheard.

Conversation #1

Man to woman: Downstairs you can get a hot dog, chips and a soda for $2.50. They’re giving away food down there. Giving it away. And no line.

Woman: I don’t care. I want the Swedish meatballs. That’s what they’re famous for. We’re staying here.

Conversation #2

Woman to small child pushing cart: Honey, you’ve got to stay on the path and keep moving. We’re like buffaloes in here. We have to go where they tell us to go.

Small cart-pushing child to woman: We’re like buffaloes?

Conversation #3

Me to youthful companions as we shuffled through a labyrinthine cafeteria line: Why are all these people using walkers?

Youthful companions to me: Those aren’t walkers, Mom. They’re tray carts to hold your food.

 

In the end, there was a plate filled with Swedish meatballs, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and for $2 extra, soup or salad and a fountain beverage of our choice.

Everything in the ordinary world, once we managed to find it again after literally getting lost in this alternate world, seemed beautifully small.

Day Twenty-Six: Inspired by that guy with the giant red paper clip

Dream: to climb Machu Picchu the long, winding, non-touristy way.

Dream: to live for a while (or maybe forever) in Montana or Colorado or Wyoming.

Dream: to build a rock or stone terraced wall-garden-thing along the sidewalk in my front yard, fill it in with dirt and then re-plant the insanity that is my perennial garden back into it.

Dream: to get really good at swing dancing.

These are just a few of my many, many, many dreams. I was thinking about some of them at dawn today, and then that guy with the giant red paper clip popped into my mind.

Remember him? He began with the huge paper clip and bartered his way up the ebay ladder until he owned a house, in Canada as I recall. This was in the news a few years ago, and the whole idea intrigued and delighted me.

Barter: it’s the new money.

I used to do a food exchange with another family. Once a week, sometimes more, we would cook twice the amount of dinner, package it up and then go leave it on the others’ doorstep. This was an idea I dreamed up out of a (probably false) sense of imaginary nostalgia (imaginary because I never experienced it myself) for the way little communities used to work, or the way I imagine they used to work, in which everyone took care of each other and each others’ children.

The other family, as I recall, was initially hesitant, but game to try. The food exchange was a huge success from the very first day. There was no pressure whatsoever – if you were flat out one week, you didn’t have to cook extra. If you were in a cooking mood one week, you could leave food two or three times.

We already knew that we each liked each others’ cooking, so there were no unpleasant surprises. The food exchange brought us closer together as friends, even though most of the time the only interaction was coming home and finding a big shopping bag by your front door.

There was something about the fact that someone else had done the cooking, then carefully wrapped it up and taken it over to the other house. It made the other family (and me, when it was my turn to find food on my doorstep) feel as if someone else was watching over them, taking care of them.

That was a long time ago, and the food exchange has been over for many years. But I was thinking about it, and missing it, as the dog and I made our way around the lake at dawn today. The food exchange was a form of barter, and barter intrigues me.

Therefore, today’s never done before challenge: to offer up something possibly barterable in return for something that I would like to do/go to/experience.

What could I barter, though? The only potentially interesting thing I came up with to offer was naming rights to a character in a future book. But that idea, for many reasons, is a dicey proposition, so I rejected it.

But wait!

It dawned on me that I do have something of actual value that can be bartered, which is a one-week stay, for yourself or your family or your friends, in the charming little hotel apartment partially owned and operated by me and my youthful companions. Right here in the heart of a famously artsy biggish city, no blackout dates other than Thanksgiving, Christmas and the Uptown Art Fair.

Got anything interesting to barter in return? If so, let me know.

Poem of the Week, by Laura Kasischke

Bike Ride with Older Boys

     - Laura Kasischke

The one I didn’t go on.

I was thirteen,

and they were older.

I’d met them at the public pool. I must

have given them my number. I’m sure

I’d given them my number,

knowing the girl I was. . .

It was summer. My afternoons

were made of time and vinyl.

My mother worked,

but I had a bike. They wanted

to go for a ride.

Just me and them. I said

okay fine, I’d

meet them at the Stop-n-Go

at four o’clock.

And then I didn’t show.

I have been given a little gift—

something sweet

and inexpensive, something

I never worked or asked or said

thank you for, most

days not aware

of what I have been given, or what I missed—

because it’s that, too, isn’t it?

I never saw those boys again.

I’m not as dumb

as they think I am

but neither am I wise. Perhaps

it is the best

afternoon of my life. Two

cute and older boys

pedaling beside me—respectful, awed. When we

turn down my street, the other girls see me …

Everything as I imagined it would be.

Or, I am in a vacant field. When I

stand up again, there are bits of glass and gravel

ground into my knees.

I will never love myself again.

Who knew then

that someday I would be

thirty-seven, wiping

crumbs off the kitchen table with a sponge, remembering

them, thinking

of this—

those boys still waiting

outside the Stop-n-Go, smoking

cigarettes, growing older.

–

For more information on Laura Kasischke, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/laura-kasischke

–

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Day Twenty-Five, in which we fulfill a long-held dream.

Today’s challenge: To develop a signature cocktail.

I’ve been trying to develop a signature cocktail for years now, or rather, I’ve been saying that I want to develop one without ever trying, unless you count the rhubarb margarita I concocted a couple of months ago, which tasted so horrible that I threw the whole thing out.

Old-school cocktails are so cool, aren’t they? The specific glasses they’re made in, the muddle this and swirl that, the various specific garnishes. Even the name “simple syrup” is elegant.

Because the still-fresh memory of that hideous rhubarb margarita was so galling, I decided, out of spite and/or stubbornness and/or stupidity, to create a signature cocktail with a rhubarb theme.

As with most of these challenges, I turned to my trusty friend Mr. Google, and after spending an hour or so perusing the many great ideas involving rhubarb and alcohol, I made a list and headed out to do some shopping. My list:

Bitters (another great name)

Gin (which I know virtually nothing about)

Tonic (can’t remember if I’ve ever actually bought it before)

Some kind of garnish (to be decided on last-minute in a zany moment of inspiration, and which ended up being a lime, which is neither zany nor inspired, but I like limes)

Hennepin-Lake Liquors, my neighborhood liquor store, which is cash-only and a little sketchy but cheap, had lots of gin. I wanted Boodles, because of the name alone, but it was too spendy. Basing my decision on name recognition within a mid-range price alone, I got Gordon’s.

There was a small but interesting selection of Bitters (again, what a great name!) and I picked the one that was made in New Orleans because I love New Orleans.

Tonic: Why is a big bottle $1.49 and a six-pack of tiny bottles $5.49? This makes absolutely no sense to me.

Back home. Straight to the rhubarb patch I went, armed with a big knife. This rhubarb patch began life as a clump that my mother dug up for me in upstate New York and which I carried onto an airplane, dirt and all, in a duffel a couple of years ago.

Like all rhubarb everywhere, it thrives no matter what I do or don’t do to it, here at the side of my house between some lilies that I planted from a bunch that someone had set out on the curb with a FREE sign and a rhododendron that was here when I moved in.

Chop chop chop, off with their heads!

Back into the kitchen. Chop chop chop some more, on the big wooden cutting board that began life as a twenty-five cent hunk of wood at someone’s garage sale and which I decided to call a cutting board.

Into a big pot with you, rhubarb, along with lots and lots of sugar.

After a long time I soaked the rhubarb, sugar and all, in some boiling-hot water, whereupon I strained it into a big bowl and tasted it. YUM. I boiled some of it with more sugar for a few minutes and tasted that. ALSO YUM.

The rhubarb was now transformed into a kind of rhubarb simple syrup, although that name lacks pizzazz.

Then I got out various accoutrements and lined them up on the counter so as to feel like a bartender, which is a secret dream job of mine despite the fact that I need a lot of alone time, barely drink, and until just now didn’t know the first thing about making a drink.

What I love about bartending is the way bartenders move behind the bar, tossing all those bottles around, dipping and scooping and filling clinking glasses with various combinations of ice and alcohol and talking and smiling the whole time. Beautiful to watch.

I used a little, non-regulation glass out because I figured, given the haunting specter of the undrinkable rhubarb margarita, that it would take me a long time to create the signature cocktail.

But I figured wrong! One try, people, and it was so tasty that I quit while I was ahead.

Now I need to have a party.

Day Twenty-Four: Hermit crab envy

I think of it as kayak syndrome. Not the kind of kayak that sits on a rack at the southern end of Lake of the Isles, but kayak.com syndrome. I don’t even want to think about how much time I spend on kayak.com, because then I’d be face to face with the true measure of my addiction.

There are tricks to traveling on the cheap, and I’m pretty sure I know 99% of them. Back in the day, airline clerks used to ask me for my IATA number, whatever that is, because they assumed I was a travel agent.

I get a panicky feeling when I look at a globe, because there are so few places, relatively speaking, that I’ve been. And how much time do I have left in which to get to all the places I haven’t been and want to go?

Maybe many years. Maybe a few days. Maybe that road trip to Montana and Wyoming, two weeks ago, was it.

Some mornings I wake up and want to crawl right out of my own skin, so restless and dissatisfied and fragmented do I feel. It’s a get me out of here feeling, with the “here” being this house, this city, this state, this country. This body. This mind.

You can see the problem. When the here you want to get out of is your own self, it’s not going to help to get on a plane to Bhutan.

But kayak syndrome sets in anyway. In one version of the site, you can plug in the dates you want to be gone and the cheapest fares to anywhere in the world will pop up all over a map of the world. Click. Click. Click.

My brother, who understands this need to travel because he has it too –although I’m not sure about the crawling out of your own skin part of it for him– sends me links to mind-boggling deals that you can take advantage of if you can get to the airport in, say, an hour or so. Or mind-boggling deals that you can take advantage of if you want to go to somewhere that, apparently, no one else in the entire world wants to go to.

Anyway, today was one of those get me out of here days. But I can’t go anywhere, at least today, so I decided to change my name instead.

You may now refer to me as A Long Chemise.

This name was first given to me by a bunch of graduating Vermont College MFA students who fed my real name through an anagram machine. They did the same thing for all the teachers, but I liked my anagram name best. The minute I heard it, I felt long and cool and summery, as if I was walking through an orchard wearing the kind of baglike dress that usually looks horrible on me, but somehow, on A Long Chemise, looked good.

If you can’t crawl out of your skin, you can rearrange the letters of your name and feel a little better, at least for a few minutes. It’s like word helium.

After walking around for a while as A Long Chemise, I decided that today’s never done before challenge would be to anagramize the names of my sisters and my brother and my youthful companions and my best friend.

I thought this would be a relatively easy task, given the existence of marvelous sites like this one.

But of course, once I actually started feeding names into the anagram machine, I got obsessed with the results. It’s a big responsibility, changing the names of those you love. Somehow the anagram name has to fit some essential quality of their personalities. This requires sifting through hundreds and hundreds of anagram names in order to hit upon the right one. It took me quite a while. Almost as long as I would have spent clicking fare after fare on kayak.com.

But the task is done, and I have to say it was a satisfying one.

My children, Nib Merino and Nib Overdone and Bulkier One, are all busy tonight. I think I’ll give my best friend Gentle Wiglets a call and see what she’s up to.

 

Day Twenty-Three: You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out.

The hour was growing late and the never-done-before crowd-sourced dance mix challenge had yet to be completed, or even begun. The list of tunes, in exact order of receipt, had grown frighteningly long, and if the dancing did not commence immediately, it would end up spanning two days.

Nay, not only two days, but two months.

No matter that the only living beings in the house were me, the dog and the cat. Plus a bat or two, probably, but I prefer not to think about them. I cued up the Spotify playlist, thank you, friend who told me I could save a bunch of money by doing it that way, and laid out some provisions on the dining table.

As the evening wore on it became clear that the correct food/ouzo/water ratio was 1:1:1, with one gulp of ouzo = half a glass of water + one chip extremely loaded with guacamole. Follow this formula and you will not go wrong.

It was strangely relaxing not to have to think about any of the below selected songs, as I had nothing to do with any of them.

They were crowd-sourced, so I didn’t allow myself to insert any songs that I personally wanted, such as Hey Ya, which ordinarily would be #1 on any dance list I had anything to do with, even snuck in in the form of the wordless Booker T. version, and which every one of my friends is probably sick of listening to.

Nope, I stuck entirely to the mix that was handed to me, and I danced each song in the order in which it was received, and I managed to squeak in just under the wire, at 11:56 p.m. Here goes.

1. Johann Froberger’s harpsichord “Meditation sur ma mort future.” M.T. Anderson, this has got to be the worst dance tune ever. What were you thinking! Dancing to this song is impossible. It was like going on a date with a nap, as a friend would say. Honestly, it was all I could do remain upright during the entire 6+ minutes of this awfulness. Sorry, Mr. Froberger.

2. Rock Lobster, by the B-52s. Thank God that Rock Lobster followed MT’s awful meditation on a dead future, because this is a song I can get behind. I love this song so much that it was all I could do not to play it five or six times in a row. But there were lots of songs to go, so I exerted huge willpower and moved on.

3. I Don’t Feel Like Dancin, by the Scissor Sisters. Great tune! But Scissor Sisters, you do make me feel like dancin. (Dancing to this song is like fighting with yourself the whole time: “I don’t feel like dancing.” “But wait, I *do* feel like dancing!”)

4. Bad Romance, by Lady Gaga. Who can argue with Gaga? This one came via one of my sisters, who’s a late, very enthusiastic discoverer of Gaga. It’s a good song, and as I danced to it I took the opportunity to imagine how a meat dress would feel. Heavy. Damp. Bloody. Steak-like. Interesting.

5. You Are My Sunshine, a “popular song first recorded in 1939,” according to Wikipedia. My friend Absalom sent me this one, and he could only have meant it as a wicked joke, a la MT Anderson, but guess what, Absalom? I loved it. As I danced to it the images of my three youthful companions kept floating through my mind, and I imagined I was giving each one a hug: the 6’4″ boy in Chicago, the tall curly-haired one working the late shift at &&, and the short one currently working as a camp counselor and staying up all night comforting wee homesick campers in Wisconsin.

6. The Hokey Pokey. This one came in via my friend Kay, who, like Absalom, no doubt meant it as a subversive joke, but again, guess what, Kay? I plugged in an amazing version by The Puppies and I put my right foot in and my left out with abandon. Take that!

7. “Anything Motown,” which I chose to interpret as Super Freak, by Rick James. This is a fabulous song, and Rick James is a fabulous guy, but I have to admit that the whole time I was dancing to it, all I could picture was that little girl in that Little Miss Sunshine movie, crawling forward on her hands and knees. (I still love the song.)

8. Pick Up the Pieces, by the Average White Band. This one brought me right back to high school, and I completely enjoyed dancing to it.

9. Go Your Own Way, by Fleetwood Mac. This one, too, brought me back to high school, or maybe college (I stink with dates), and I had a hard time interpreting all the emotions that came along with it. As I danced to it I couldn’t make up my mind whether this particular song makes me feel happy or sad. A combination, maybe. Stevie Nicks, I salute your bring me your leather take from me your lace self.

10. I Will Survive, by Gloria G. This is one of those anthemic songs that make you feel strong and powerful and full of strength. Yes, I *will* survive. Thank you, Gloria Gaynor.

11. Truth Is, by Brother Ali. Whenever I hear a song by Brother Ali I picture him as I sometimes see him, making his way down Lyndale or Nicollet, one of his kids in tow, and at the same time I picture him on stage with his head thrown back, singing his heart out. I don’t know Brother Ali, but I feel as if I do. Truth Is!

12. The Time Warp, from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Yes! The Time Warp! This brought me right back to when Rocky Horror first came out: the toast, the rice, the raincoats. What a weird, fun, bizarrely sexy movie. I had to resist playing this one more than once too. Thank you, person who sent this one to me. Exclamation marks indicate happiness.

13. Boogie Shoes, by KC and the Sunshine Band. Oh, dear other sister who sent this one in, how happy you made me. First by sending it in like this, in your completely unabashed capital-letter+exclamation marks way –BOOGIE SHOES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!– and second because I got to dance to it. Who can resist such a song? Not you, and not me.

14. Last Dance, by Donna Summer. This one starts out so slow and sad. But then she jumps it into a real dance tune, and because of that, and because it reminds me of high school and college, and because she died recently, I danced this one with all my heart.

15. Lonely Boys, by the Black Keys. It’s the Black Keys! and they’re great! and so is this song, which is impossible not to dance to.

16. Brown-eyed Girl, by Van Morrison. This was a tough one, since dancing to this song =, in my mind, dancing to it with a boyfriend. No boyfriend present = figuring out how to dance to it alone. This could have made me sad, but I decided not to be sad, and it all went down pretty well.

17. “Come on Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners. Great tune! Brings me back to many a late-night party and much late-night fun. Thank you, person who sent it to me.

18. “You Spin Me Right Round” by Dead or Alive. When I first read the name of this song and the band who wrote it, I drew a blank. But the minute it spun up on the playlist I recognized it, and with great happiness. Love this song. Thank you, Jake.

19. Scenes from an Italian Restaurant, by Billy Joel. This one, like Brown-Eyed Girl, seems to require a slow-dancing partner in order to make the most of it. I did my best, but I admit to taking a few ouzo breaks as it spun itself out.

20. “I Like the Way You Move, by the Bodyrockers. Oh! How I love this song. Who couldn’t love this song? Someone once put it on a mix he made me for Valentine’s Day, and as I danced to this song, I can’t deny that the memory of that made me cry. But still, I wouldn’t trade it away.

21. Red Alert, Basement Jaxx. So I’m 99% sure I never heard this song before I listened to it on youtube, but wow, it fits my personal definition of a Great Song, in that one-third of the way through it felt familiar, as if I already knew it. This is a fabulous tune! I would tell you that it took all my willpower not to play it through five times in a row, but that would be a lie, because I did, in fact, play it through five times in a row. This tune has instantly vaulted to my top 10 dance songs. Thank you, Nick.

22. Jump, by the Pointer Sisters. Another classic, wonderful tune. By this point I had turned out all the lights, so that my 88-year-old neighbor wouldn’t be freaked out by the sight of me leaping about my dining room late at night, and so I felt free to jump –JUMP!– as high as I wanted.

23. Love Shack, by the B-52s. Can you imagine my delight at another B-52s song? Two in one night. First Rock Lobster and now the Love Shack. My cup runneth over.

24. Lord Tanamo, by Matty Rag. SKA! I wouldn’t even have thought of putting ska on my dance list, and I loved swaying around my living room to the gentle beat of Lord Tanamo. Thank you, Sandy.

25. And last but certainly not least, Salt Shaker, by the Ying Yang Twins. All I can say about this one is a) it’s a damn good thing I had all the lights off (it was near midnight at this point) so that my 88-year-old neighbor didn’t have to witness me mimicking the moves of the official video, and b) I kind of hate to admit how much I like this song.

I hereby proclaim Day Twenty-Three the most fun never-done-before challenge yet. Thanks, crowd-sourcerers.

Day Twenty-Two, in which we fall far, far short of our stated goal

The goal of yesterday was to 1) compile a dance mix consisting solely of favorite dance tunes submitted by those who responded to the following question: “Favorite dance tune? Weigh in please,” and then 2) dance the entire mix through without stopping.

There were subsidiaries (not the right word, but I like it anyway) of this goal, which included things like “compile the dance mix in the order in which it was received,” which got that robot-lady voice going in my head all day (“your call will be answered in the order in which it was received. your call will be answered in the order in which it was received. your call will be answered in the order in which it was received.”), which impeded my progress.

There were interruptions, such as the fact that several of my friends –that would be you, Stinky and you, Tobin and you, Kay– submitted, respectively, the following tunes: You Are My Sunshine, Johann Froberger’s harpsichord “Meditation sur ma mort future,” and The Hokey Pokey.

Thanks, friends!

Especially you, Tobin!

Anyway, the whole second part of yesterday’s goal –to dance the mix all the way through without stopping, even to go to the bathroom– got completely derailed because I ended up youtubing all the songs, including Rock Lobster by the B-52s, which is a song I love so inordinately that I ended up playing it through twenty or thirty times and dancing to it alone.

I wish myself better luck today.