My Saturday night boogie

Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I went out dancing to Michael Jackson last night!

I can’t remember the last time I went out dancing on a Saturday night. It’s not something I did very often (maybe once or twice? – and maybe even then under duress) even when I was 18, so let me explain.

Earlier in the year my flatmate decided she was going to take singing lessons, so off she went to a singing teacher who’d been recommended to her from someone somewhere. Said singing teacher was involving all her students in a “concert” of sorts and asked my flatmate if she wanted to be in it. She decided to give it a go. So, each student had to pick a song from a set list, because the teacher decided that rather than using backing tracks they’d get a real live band to back them up this time, and the students could have a go at live stage singing. So, way back then my flatmate chose 'Don’t blame it on the Sunshine' by Michael Jackson.

As Providence would have it he died two days before the concert.

What this meant is that when my flatmate came out to sing, on the stage of the Petersham RSL auditorium, she filled the dance floor as just about everyone present got up to pay their tribute to the King of Pop. And a superb performance it was.

I am not the world’s greatest public dancer. Maybe it’s partly phobia because I grew about a foot in one year when I was around 15. Maybe it's something about the atmosphere of dancing joints – the darkened room lit-up in flashes by the pulsating disco balls, the relentless thumping noise of dance music – that comes over me like a big wet blanket and I’d rather be someplace else (say someplace where there is an unplugged guitar strumming softly in the background, the moon is rising over the ocean and I can hold a conversation with one of the people around me). But hey, I let my hair down, danced liked no one was watching and got into those moves for “sunshine”, “moonlight” and “boogie” (I like set moves – it means a few moments respite from having to make up my own funky "freestyle", a few seconds assurance that I might be close to doing what everybody else is doing).

Added to that, the band playing the music, “the frocks”, is a band of women who, err, punt from the Cambridge the end, to steal a line from Lost in Austen, when Amanda tells Bingley she “prefers women” (which originates in the fact that you can tell the difference (or used to be able to) between students from Cambridge and students from Oxford by which end of a punt they, um, punt from, with the Oxford end considered more “orthodox”). So, there were quite a lot of Cambridge punters amongst the audience, and there was a lot of, um, slightly unusual dancing going on.

And that, folks, is the story of how I came to be dancing to Michael Jackson in the Petersham RSL with half a room full of lesbians.