The Thriller Dance

One of my favorite 80’s film noir Sci-Fi flicks is Bladerunner. Starring a painfully young Harrison Ford stars as the specially created police force agent Decker, and Sean Young as an achingly beautiful human-like robot. The tale is about the other robots who, designed for off-world labor, are not allowed on Earth. When they break the law and return home – usually violently -- Decker “retires” them. They don’t go willingly. One tries to strangle him to death with a pair of gorgeous thighs, another with a karate chop to the neck. And those are just the ladies. The men try to shoot him, throw him off buildings, break his fingers, and beat him to an inch of his life. Even Young’s character Rachael, gets a good shot in with a cannon of a handgun in perfect lipstick, a smashing 1940’s-era suit, and a coat with a huge fuzzy collar.

It seems that these creatures, while “more human than human,” nonetheless have a four-year life span. The most resplendent off these illegal, childlike denizens of mother earth, and their leader, is Roy, who grabs his creator by the head and intones “I want more life f_____” right before he squeezes him to death. The censors substitute the word “father.” Those of us who saw the director’s cut know that the substitution doesn’t necessarily mar the intent of the moment, but does subtly shift it into the Frankensteinian motif the film evokes. This being October and closing in on Halloween, it’s a good time to view such crazy cool stuff again.

So, being Halloween season, it’s time for rehearsals of Michael Jackson’s Thriller that this fair city’s young and interesting will perform in the streets of downtown again this year. I went and began learning it all over again. The rehearsals have all the excitement of the high school musical (I think they just put a film out of that, too), all breathless, a little sweaty and a mind to “getting the feet right.” Dan, bless his heart, took the baby with whom I was five months pregnant last year when I did this. It was a great kickoff to a great weekend that started Thursday night with a celebratory soda with friends, the dance rehearsals, a Friday Day at the Spa Dan gave me as a birthday present, a Friday night academic talk, a late, late Friday night on the porch talking about Deconstruction, the Saturday morning Farmer’s market, a great day at the legendary huge barbecue of a local millionaire, and Dan’s band’s gig at the old watering hole with 50 of my favorite people in attendance. Sunday, we had chicken dinner with friends (who had raised the chicken themselves and to whom I took a conciliatory plate of pesto pasta with fresh basil from the garden), then Sunday night with my favorite boys.

Props to Dan, Heidi, and our good friends Thad and Rebecca who made it all possible. After working for two weeks straight grading papers and trying to move mountains through the growing pains of our school’s IT problems, it was a welcome return to all the other good things in life. It was exhausting and I think I averaged 4 or 5 hours of sleep for a week, but I came out of the other end so refreshed and energized, it felt like I’d slept for a week.

It seems I want more life, f_______.

It also seems that I got it. No, not seems, did. Now by Saturday, I was really pathetically jonesing for some time with my baby boy. I missed him so badly Saturday night that I had to flip open my phone to see his picture a couple of times while out at the gig. It made Sunday all that much sweeter when from sunup to sundown, I got all day playtime and snuggling with Connor and Dan. It was a good day. They all were. A great weekend. A stellar weekend. The kind of weekend that puts soul and body back together and makes them ready to face the work coming down the pike again.

And I’m happy. Oh, I know that the papers are coming, that the students are starting to wear out and get cranky and blame me, that the school’s IT issues and my half-luddite attempts to get around them aren’t going away anytime soon, that I’m going to have more on my academic plate than I feel like I can handle, and that the editing of my manuscript will be torturous and needs to get done this week.

But for now, I’m just thrilled.