We spent Easter weekend in Baltimore, Maryland, about a five hour drive from our home. As always happens when we get out of our ordinary surroundings — our house, our town, our state — and out of our repetitive routine, my brain broke its patterns and opened up to the wider world.
I came home with a fresh list of writing prompts, a camera full of images, and inspiration to put my reading project aside for a bit so I can play with words. For the month of April, I will dedicate 10 minutes per day to writing. I will post an entry every day to my blog, and will use the tag #aprildaily.
As with last year’s Aprildaily project, I anticipate minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. I’m out of practice and have low expectations for what I’ll produce, but I’m excited to fill my pens with ink, and empty them back out onto paper.
One of the things I miss most about living in a big city (besides the libraries) is access to night clubs. I love to dance. When I’m in a dark club with lights flashing and music thumping, and I become immersed in dancing and everything else goes out of focus, I move into an ecstatic state akin to what snake handlers feel when they catch the spirit. I don’t need alcohol, I just need the music to be loud and the club to be crowded enough that I can become anonymous. If I get into a good groove, and the music moves through me as if I am a part of it, as if my body is the instrument that completes it, I feel like I’m communing with the Universe. There’s a mystery in music that moves me, and for once, I don’t care to analyze it. When I dance, I just want to submit to it. I don’t crave the experience often, especially now that I’m a parent and go to bed at 10 o’clock, but in DC, and Tampa, and Minneapolis, I had access to those clubs for the once or twice a year I felt the urge to slip into that altered state.
Here in small town Virginia, not so much. I don’t think those clubs exist around here. And even if they do, nobody will invite me to one now because they’ll be scared I’ll start speaking in tongues (I won’t!). BUT. Thanks to my good friend, Dee, who invited my daughter and me to free skating lessons on Saturday mornings, I may have found an alternative.
When we skate at the free skate, from 10 AM to noon on Saturdays, they keep the music low and the lights high. Rolling around and around that rink, when the music is just loud enough to sing along and skate in rhythm, and my hair lifts off my neck a tiny bit from gliding across the smooth floor, I want to really get into it. I want them to turn the lights down, and the music up, and I want it dark and fast, with strobe lights flashing. I want the rink to be a moving mass of roller skaters, discoed out and dancing, like a night club, but on wheels. I roll around the rink, holding our daughter’s hand, and think, why did that never catch on?
I mean, who wouldn’t want to get in on that?! I totally would.
Adventure World, the rink in our town that offers free skate on Saturdays, hosts a roller derby team (Dee, we’re going to go watch them race, right?), and even better, my friend said they sometimes have an 80s night. Who needs night clubs when you can have 80s night at the skating rink? Now all I have to do is keep practicing, so I can dance and roll at the same time. Then I’ll start rounding up adults who are willing to strap on roller skates and go disco with me. It might take some time in a small town, but that’s all right. We’ll be here a while.
For readers in the New River Valley (Blacksburg, Christiansburg, southwest Virginia), Adventure World Skate & Fun Center offers free skate lessons from 10AM to noon on Saturdays. The lessons are very free form – our daughter and I mostly just skate around and around by ourselves – but there are very helpful and fun instructors available if we have questions or would like to learn any basic skills.
Butterfly Mind 