PUT ON YOUR RED SHOES

and dance the blues

The 1983 David Bowie song, Let’s Dance, was a near theme song on the streets and in the clubs of Manhattan during the mid 1980s. There is nothing like good music and a spacious dance floor to inspire joy. I had a chance to bathe in that the other evening. Dance and color…two salves for our time.

Ruby red slippers. Cherries in the Snow lipstick. Hearts and flowers. Christmas. Love and romance. Blood and guts. The story of red is long. Who does not feel a bit brighter and happier when wearing it? Red is the first color babies recognize.

However, the red dress, cardigan, shoes, t-shirt, and handbag in my closet have been ignored for the past year. The association with MAGA is too great. However, the red leaves of Autumn and the relentless red blooms on the Brazilian Jasmine nudge me to allow some crimson back in.

Blue is said to be the rarest of hues. Years went by without giving much thought to the color associations of U.S. political parties. Last Winter I installed blue bulbs to the light fixtures on my garage to add some subtle light to the dark driveway at night. When someone recently asked me the significance of the blue lights, I had to laugh, as all I had in mind is that they are pretty and slightly noir in the dark. We are a society of code and message. I am clearly leaning blue, though. I even acquired a blue vehicle this past year.

An evening of dancing reminded me of the Horace McCoy 1935 novel, They Shoot Horses Don’t They? The dark story was later made into a film (Sydney Pollock, 1969) featuring Jane Fonda tells of a dance marathon contest during the Great Depression when a $1500 prize kept the desperate contenders dancing for days on end.

After enduring a spirit-breaking ordeal, in part due to being exploited by the promoters, lead character, Gloria (Jane Fonda), walks away emptyhanded with no cash for her efforts. Entirely despondent and unwilling to go on a moment longer with her life, she asks her dance partner to shoot her. He complies. Recalling a painful incident from childhood when he observed his uncle shoot an injured horse to put it out of misery, he responded to the police later on when asked why he was willing to do such a thing: They shoot horses, don’t they?

So very dark.

Another sad bit of history counters every aspect of joy and fun associated with dance. The Dancing Plague of 1518 occurred one summer in Strasbourg, France. What began when a woman named Frau Troffea began dancing uncontrollably, followed in the next couple months by a few hundred others mysteriously joining the obsessive mass movement, stopping only by collapse from exhaustion, stroke, heart attack, hunger, thirst. Often their feet would become swollen to the point of bleeding into their shoes. Several died in the process.

While a curious story, I am also skeptical. How accurate is our recordkeeping of the 16th Century? One theory is the possibility of a fungus on the local Rye that was made into the bread that they all consumed, triggering a psychoactive altered consciousness. Another theory refers to the Nocebo Effect as psychological influence stirred the belief of one person after the other that they too must be afflicted and unable to resist the urge to join in the mad dance.

Detail from DANCING THROUGH DISASTER, 16 x 16-inch painting by author (available at patologyworks.etsy.com)

Today, a little more dance and color strikes me as a bright and refreshing elixir to soften the madness of our here and now.

…Let’s dance
To the song they’re playing on the radio
Let’s sway
While color lights up your face
Let’s sway
Sway through the crowd to an empty space…

Read all about the color red in Rose Florence’s essay. She has also published additional pieces about the other two primary colors, blue and yellow.

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