fox

From time to time I come back to the YouTube dance mashup mixes that were big five-ish years ago. (You know the ones I mean. Old Movie Stars Dance to Uptown Funk, which clips Old Hollywood dance sequences with Uptown Funk as the soundtrack; Shut Up and Dance, which clips all sorts of movie dancing onto, well, "Shut Up and Dance." There are many others but I believe those are the ones that seeded what may have turned out to be a trend.) I could watch them for hours. The skill of the vid compiler is one thing to admire, of course, managing to line up the beats and tempos of dances filmed 85 years ago with the beats and tempos of a modern song (that "Uptown Funk" has a brilliant "Stop. Waitaminute," for example) - but even more than that, I love watching the dancing. I love watching the dancers.

I have tremendous respect and not a little envy for people who can move their bodies any way they want (and 9/10 of the time look good doing it).* But they also, especially when they're dancing together, generally look like they're having so much fun. Sometimes they look that way in a dance solo (couple of moments where e.g. Astaire catches his cane perfectly in time and grins delightedly before he carries on hoofing it), but when two or three are dancing together? My god, the moment where one dancer looks over at the other - sometimes it's looking at their feet, just checking in that they're still together; sometimes it's looking at their face, just checking in that they're still together. I love it. The communication. (I once went to a folk music jam at a pub where one guy had a guitar and one girl had a blown instrument of some kind - could have been a plastic recorder, for all I remember, I don't know, a pipe or fife or something - and one guy had a violin, and the best part for me was watching that fiddler watch his buddies and change what he was doing based on what they were doing. Like I could see him watching the guitarist's left hand and clock the chord changes and make his own decisions in that tiny amount of time. Brilliant.) And look, I know the face is part of the body. They're deciding what to do with their eyes just as much as they are with every other thing they can move how they want to. Half the time when they're smiling they're probably miserable; half the time when they're smiling at one another they probably hate each other's guts. Some of the grinning-and-checking-in stuff I love so much is, like, Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon. These are not people who were happy a lot of the time. I get it.

* For this reason, although it's fun that the vidder can make the beats match up,** I don't have a ton of use for the clips that are (a) from animated films or (b) wire work, e.g. "Airplane!"
** This "Shut Up and Dance" has Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer's Ländler from The Sound of Music at 2:29 where the lyric is "Just keep your eyes on me." I'm saying: There's a right way to do this sort of mashup, and this is it.

But I love watching it. I wish like hell I could move my body like that and have the fun they make it look like they're having.

( Meanwhile, my chorus is back to in-person rehearsal as of this evening. )

I want to go, and every time I think about going I immediately feel a very strong throb of what I know perfectly well is anxiety. ( Himself says he knows exactly how I feel )

The thing is that I am also familiar with rehearsal anxiety because I used to routinely feel like I didn't want to go, couldn't possibly, heart pounding, had to drag myself out of the house because I was up against my max absences - and then by the end of the evening I'd be glad I'd gone. Happened all the time in the Before. Sometimes it was the generalized social anxiety I felt all the time around, for example, when my dad died - but other times it was the generalized social anxiety I felt as a confirmed introvert. Don't Wanna + Didn't Wanna Last Time + Turned Out Okay Last Time = Guess I Will. Which is fine, but it also means I can't tell how much of my current rehearsal anxiety is that and how much of it is but plaaague.

Right now my plan is to go to rehearsal tonight. (I asked Himself if he was secretly hoping I would decide not to go and he said "I don't think so." Introspection is hard for all of us right now also.) I guess I have until wheels-up to make a firm decision one way or the other.

Okay no. But I have made masks! A hundred years (that is, a couple of months) ago when All This began, a former co-worker friend made some masks for me and my family, which was lovely of her. Two for me, which are fine; they smush my nose just a bit but otherwise no problem. Two for Himself, which are fine; they cut into his jowls just a bit but otherwise no problem. Four for the prince, which don't fit; she thoughtfully made them with elastic bands to go behind our heads rather than around our ears, and the kid is still kid-proportioned enough that an elastic band that will hold the bottom of the mask snugly around his chin and the nape of his neck won't fit over the top of his head nohow. I cut the elastics on one of these and tied them into ear loops, which more or less works; he doesn't like the feeling of the things pulling on his ears, even when I made the loops loose enough that the mask no longer smushes his nose. I crocheted him a button band to take the pressure of the elastic loops and he didn't like that either - it was a little too short, so the mask flattened his nose again. I added a mini hair elastic to each ear loop, so now everything reaches everything else at the perfect length, but he's not convinced. Sigh.

So I cleaned up and re-started my mom's old sewing machine, which was probably a wedding present in 1969, and made him one of these, which of course was wildly ambitious for mama's first sewing project but it's not like I'm brand-new to Making Stuff In General, and long story short, it went okay. Everything is put together as it's meant to be and I threaded some yarn through the loops to make a head tie instead of any elastic anywhere, and on today's walk I gave the kid the choice of the new one that ties behind his head and the old one that loops around his ears, and he picked the new one. He still takes it off as soon as he's allowed to, but hey.

I also made Himself one of these, which was way easier piecing-and-sewing-wise, although he also wanted behind his head rather than around his ears, and I mos def should have run the yarn through the side hems before I sewed up the pleats. I got it done, with a tapestry needle. But it would have been tidier to do otherwise. In any event, he didn't like the yarn, so I pulled that out and have threaded up some elastic through there and will measure it around his head later this evening and then probably stitch the ends of the elastic together and call that one done.

I have a yard each of many patterns of fabric and 5 yards of plain off-white for linings, so I can keep doing this until I get better at it, is my feeling. (In my copious free time, of course.) As you may have seen me say on Facebook, I'm not going to win any prizes at any county fairs, but the objects are functional. Right now. As intended. And if there's a prize for Quickness on the Uptake, maybe I can win that. ;-)