the playground

This place about to blow

“So is this your first burner massive?”
“… My first what?”
I look around wildly. Shit, is this like the time I didn’t realize my university was evangelical until I was in my second year? I was sitting in chapel one of the three days a week we were obligated to go and tuned in for a second to hear “and since we’re an evangelical school, we …” tuned out to think, oh my god, I don’t know what evangelicals believe, how did I not read the packets more closely, (seriously, how do you miss something like that), I thought this was just a “general” Christian school, what have i gotten myself into? 
Having already given myself away as a virgin to my surroundings, I start asking all the questions necessary to figure out where the hell I am, and make sure I didn’t accidentally enter a warehouse full of people where the end of the night culminates in a mass orgy or a cult sacrifice. My fears are quickly assuaged by Jessica, and I relax, and wonder why we’re not dancing yet. Someone in a parrot costume walks by me, and a man with Day of the Dead-esque face paint with him grabs my hand and squeezes it as he walks by.

“Can I give you a hug?”
The Asian boy with a fake knife through his head is rolling hard, and he reaches over and gives me a boa-constrictor hug. It’s the sweatiest hug I’ve ever gotten, and as the bass drops and pumps and pulses, I wonder when he’s going to let me go. Maybe I’m tired, maybe I’m cold-hearted, maybe I just don’t like strangers touching me, but really, I just want to dance like a crazy person and fling my arms around and push my feet into the ground and spin in circles until my makeup melts and my Minnie Mouse ears fall off.
There are a lot of things that, for some reason, don’t naturally occur to me. Like Chik-fil-a is probably meant to sound like “chick(en) fillet.” Buffalo wings are just chicken wings, city of origin: Buffalo. (It’s not just chicken-related issues, though I’m starting to sense a pattern). So it didn’t occur to me that since I love dancing, I’d love dancing at a rave. I just assumed dancing had to be confined to one’s apartment or to impromptu dance parties at summer camps or in dorm rooms or to clubs where dudes you don’t know come up behind you and wiggle against your butt and you oblige, maybe you even initiate the wiggling, because it’s the only place you’ve got where you’re allowed to dance like you don’t give a fuck. (Or like you want to fuck.)

“Do you want to dance?”
“I am dancing.”
“No, I know. I mean with me.”
Since this isn’t a nightclub and I’ve suddenly realized I don’t have to let anyone wiggle on, around or near my butt, I shake my head no and turn away, and feel suddenly, ridiculously liberated. 
I’m my own little dancing machine, and I can bop, I can flail, I can sway as long as I want or until my friends make me leave.
I can thank those wild Bohemian beatnik parties in the 50s that ultimately somehow spawned the reason I’m in a place called Treasure Island where people with glowstick-jellyfish appendages attached to their costumes are twirling next to me for my Halloween. My makeup never does melts, and Minnie’s ears stay surprisingly put. But it’s OK. There’s always next time.