Monday, September 29, 2003 6:59:38 AM Joe Coluccio

C'mon, babe, bend over, shake a tail feather.

Now I like a poetic image as much as the next person, but I was taken aback when the loud speaker in the shower room at the local spa that I attend each morning exhorted me to "scratch myself like a monkey." I tried it, rhythm pounding and water sealing my eyes shut.

The whole point of going to exercise daily on machines devised by Tomás de Torquemada is to become healthy and glowing. A secondary goal is to be able to parade my body around with a kind of grace that one finds in people who can dance. I have, as usual, succeeded minimally in the first and have managed to elude any semblance to Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly. (I did once dance with my umbrella but it was during a violent rain storm and I punched a hole in the canvas back of a lawn chair.)

In my high school days a whole host of like disembodied amplitude modulated exhortations entered my consciousness. New dances would spew from the radio on a daily basis. Everyone was gaga over them. And I admit that even I fell sway, in a chair, while reading adventures, to the lush and heavy rhythms that throbbed from my blue transistor Arvin radio. Weekends when I would away to the hops, sock and brew, I was far too clumsy and embarrassed to dance. My chubby body not at all in sync with the beatific beat in my soul.

How graceful could I look while making a chuffa chuffa motion like a railroad train, now. Or trying to grind invisible softened boiled potatoes into mashed spuds. Or twisting in a jerky parody of Chubby Checker. Could I hully gully or frug, jerk or watutsi (sadly brought to our attention nowadays by those wild wacky antics of the Burundian hutus and the Rwandan tutsis . Hey hey hey , Pony, like Bony Maroni, We would neigh, like a lost mustang herd chased into a stark rocky western canyon. The maximized wonders of the funky chicken, arms back, heads down, Peck a Peck, eventually turned into an awful wedding ritual.

Dance after dance mixed finally into high glosslallia. La la la la La la la la la La dooty wop ja boop a womp bomp a lum momp. Heat and sex. It looked like such fun. My secret sin, Do Bop Shoo Bop was that all I wanted to do was grope my partner in a very slow sensual dance. Scarcely more than a sliding embrace, a soft swish across the floor. We never moved. Just inhaled.

So I spent more than half the dance watching from the benches that lined the gymnasium, longing but trying to look very sophisticated, while girls danced with girls. And daring guys who looked very cool or very silly bent over like a fluff tailed duck and clucking, danced.

Do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight!

KC, I couldn’t have said it much better myself.

As for the monkey thing, the modesty curtain on the shower was pulled shut. I hope.