Thoughts on Emotion: Seeds of Passion

Last week I had the pleasure of dancing to Dim All the Lights for Layla Mary's Donna Summer Tribute Show.

A child of the 70s, I danced at the altar of her music. I clearly remember the peach-and-neon-scripted Casablanca sticker of her single 45 "Spring Affair" (B Side "Winter Melody") which rarely left our turntable until it was usurped by her mega-chart-topping album Bad Girls.

"Um... you do girls know what that song is about?" my mother tentativley asked one sweltering afternoon while my sister and I jammed relentlessly to the whistle rhythm of the title track. She held up the album cover, featuring lady Donna herself in a negligé chatting up a nightstick weilding cop.

"Sure!" we chirped, "It's about prostitutes!" Of course we had no real idea what a prostitute was other than that it involved wearing really sexy clothing.

I suppose this convinced my mother that we were clueless enough to let us keep listening.

But "Bad Girls" wasn't even my favorite track, anyway. When it came to heart-slamming, make-you-wanna-dance disco, there was no substitute for "Hot Stuff."  And for joyful, soul-stirring elation, there was "Dim All the Lights."

"It sounds like she's underwater!" carped my sister when Donna's echoey voice throbbed, "Do it tonight... you know the moments are right..." (And even then that syntactical liberty bothered me, but what the hell, I figured... conjugational accuracy be damned!) My nine-year-old body would writhe down into my most super-sexy dance moves ... "Turn my brown body white..." (OK, I'd think, gotta get a better tan for that line to work...)

And as I'd dance, I'd imagine an enthralled audience ... dozens --  no hundreds -- of people riveted by my powerful embodiment of this music, an absolute union of body, soul and sound. Funny thing is... I never thought about applause -- only the idea of transmitting through movement what the music meant to me.

And, yeah, it was just a disco song. But it brought so much out of me... love, joy, power, sensuality, in short a sense of True Self that I experienced in so little else (this was especially true as I was a pretty depressed kid).

So.... here I was, decades later, dancing to that very song for a cheerfully riveted crowd and I couldn't help noticing the irony:  As a child I had danced this fantasy version of my adult self countless times, yet here I was, now an adult, living the fantasy -- and only able to think of myself as a child.

My first thought was:  Well, don't we just always want to be something we aren't?!

But the opposite was true:  My dance that night was the fruition of the seed planted in that childhood fantasy.

And because that fantasy held a kernel of True Self -- to that experience, those actions, those expressions that brought me deepest, purest joy -- it lived within me all these years and relentlessly (and sometimes painfully) compelled me to live the life I now have, where dance and theater are so essential to who I am that I would shrivel and die if I were denied their expression.

It has become increasingly important to me to become attuned to those feelings of joy, and often to reach back into my earliest childhood memories -- before the time that I started worrying what people thought of me and if my choices were good enough to make me worthy of love -- for those kernels of Who I Really Am.

Those seeds of passion are still waiting, and bit by bit I am dusting them off, warming them, planting and nourishing them because there is nothing more important than this, and no more important time than now.

And I know:  the moments are right.