Time To Be A Dancer

I've got a good friend who has become really serious lately. Not serious in a bad way, but serious in an extreme way. All of us, at different times in our life come to a point where we've got to take things a bit more soberly than when we were younger. But the has to be a limit. In my friends case, there doesn't seem to be a spark anymore, it's like he's on auto-pilot with an ”I'm on the highway of life and there ain't no getting off” attitude. Now of all people, I can’t make any harsh judgments on the subject of seriousness. A case for having the opposite tendency could easily be made against me

A case in point, (I felt a little like Rod Serling for a second there). If my aforementioned friend and I are sitting down in the same room to read the newspaper, my friend invariably: a) won’t even look at it or b) instantly finds the most depressing article and somehow relates it to his life. For example if the headline reads, "Locusts Invade Israeli Farming Community," he’ll look up and begin a long diatribe about the problems he is having with pests in his own garden. My eye has a tendency to find articles like "Private Dick Bill Passes Council." Now that’s an article that jumps out and grabs your attention, if nothing else. The story itself has nothing to do with my life and unless I become a private investigator, it will soon be forgotten. My favorite headline, which may be apocryphal, was reprinted in National Lampoon's True Facts. It was an article about a crazed person who escaped from custody and sexual assaulted a woman in a laundromat. Now, the story is not in the slightest way funny, but the headline reads, "Nut Bolts Screws Washer." The person who wrote that should get some kind of trophy.

But I digress. It seems that all around me people are getting far too serious about their careers, their diets, their finances and even their entertainment. Sometimes you just have to step back and say, “Enough of that,” and start to smile again. A while back I was having one of “those” days. I swear, some cosmic force was picking me out that day. It started off with my car simply stopping on my way to do some errands. I made my way to a banking machine to get some money for a cab and discovered that the computer at my bank incorrectly instructed itself that my account was closed rendering the card useless. Eventually I did get to meet my wife for lunch and I grumbled about what a rotten day it was and what else could go wrong. She smiled at me and said something that both made me feel better and made me feel worse. She said, "Well, you've had worse days." She was right, I have had worse days, really worse days than that and survived them too. But even with that positive thought I began to count those worse days and figured out I had better stop if I wanted to finish the day off with any sort of good mood. Things that day did get better, the car just had a piece of ice stuck in the fuel line and by the time I got to it, the sun had warmed the engine enough to dislodge it and the car started right up.

Just a while ago I watched a “Best of” video about the late comedian John Belushi. In it was an unreleased short film done by Belushi shortly before his death. It was called "Don't Look Back in Anger". It showed a very old Belushi visiting the gravesite of the "Not Ready for Prime-time Players", the cast of the original Saturday Night Live. As he moved stiffly along through the snow, he pointed to each headstone and described to the camera how each of his co-stars died. He wryly pointed out that everyone thought he would be the first to go. Belushi lived by the sixties philosophy of “live hard, die young and leave a good-looking corpse”. He said the reason he survived the others was not because of the way he lived his life but because he was a dancer. I guess it’s all in the attitude. Granted, he did die and that kind of takes the edge off the argument, but Belushi did have a point. Nothing will remove the stresses of family or work or simply breathing, but maybe we just have to realize that this is just life, it isn't a test and God is not going to grade us at the gates of Heaven (I sure hope I am right, if not I think I am pushing a D-). So maybe we should take a small lesson from a dead comedian. Maybe if there was a bit of a dancer in all of us life might be a little easier to take. So if things start to get a little too serious, pull out your dance card and take a look around you. Let yourself go, be a dancer. I don't know if it will work for you, but I have a full dance card.