In your face

Looking in the mirror before bed: there on my forehead, blood! This is, two dried blood trails from stabbings I'd gotten that afternoon clearing out barbed quince suckers in my yard. Everyone has reservations about unaccompanied old guys, especially those with hieroglyphs of blood on their forehead. It would have been no wonder if at the 'barn' dance at New England Conservatory (half American square and half Balkan/Israeli circle) people had looked at me with strange expressions, and perhaps they did. My hands are often discolored with bruises, my arms or legs stripped with scratches and so invite the speculation of the curious. But this was much more 'in your face' because actually on my face.

Still the crowd of families and couples and singles from kids to seniors was more interested in dance, and dance we did dance--squares and long ways, circles and marches--for two delightful hours driven by the live music of NEC students playing fiddles, mandolins, banjos, accordions and other instruments.

As we came to the end of the evening, the leader was getting us to do all kinds of things: to loop  around ourselves in long snake-like sinuosities and spirals, to form arches for the others to go under (two irrepressible little girls loved this), and then to alternate over and under, to pair up for polka-like prancings in the middle of the circling circle before blending back into the perimeter. Once, spontaneously, two men, arms on each others shoulders, turned round each other in the center of the ring, kicking and stamping, as the rest of us clapped and whooped.

Okay, so I didn't wash my face, even look at it, before I left to go dancing. Appalled that night as I gazed in the mirror, I wouldn't have blamed any for hanging back, but it turns out the music, the dance, the high spirits trumped all hesitation, and I left the hall not even thinking I might not have had a good time.