Let's (Watch Other People) Dance
No, I will not share any Mary Oliver poems, instead I have three video clips from favorite movies.
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Dear Beautiful Friends,
I’m writing from the Pacific Northwest corner of America, where I’m doing my rounds in the washing machine of post-election emotions.
As I move through the days, these two lines keep surfacing:
“Silence feels so accurate.” - Mark Rothko
“My work is loving the world,” - Mary Oliver
By “silence” I mean my own, a silence that keeps me from being a verbal hand grenade in the company of loved ones, spouting, venting, stomping, and causing the kind of distress I’d like to avoid feeling myself.
Also, I do feel like a giant cliche reaching for Mary Oliver (can’t I be more cool, more radical, more original? Um, no.) I did get a good laugh from one writer’s post online: Spare me the Mary Oliver poems! Can’t I just grieve in peace?
Yes. Yes, you can! Let’s have it all, and feel our feet on the ground whenever that should occur.
Speaking of feet, and ground—
Let’s (watch other people) dance❣️💃🏻
Here are three short clips of dance scenes in movies that have exalted my senses:
1. Poor Things
It took me a while to finally see this movie—in which Emma Stone plays a woman with the brain of a baby and a wild lack of self-consciousness. I was not ready for this sensory thunderstorm of delights. Emma Stone’s acting had my hair standing on end, and Mark Ruffalo should have an Oscar sitting on his bookshelf for his performance.
2. The Big Lebowski, Bowling Dance
Something fun to know about this Big Lebowski music number. When Jeff Bridges goes sailing beneath the spread legs of a line of dancers, take note: Apparently all the dancers surprised him by wearing giant fake muffs in their crotches. So when he is looking up in ecstasy, the Dude really was surprised.
3. Jojo Rabbit
This might be one of my favorite movies in the last several years. It’s ART in its highest form: tragedy rendered beautifully. Take one heart-wrenching topic (Nazi Germany), and add humor, innocence, quiet heroism, resistance, beauty, saturated colors, mischief, horror, murder, and redemption—the entirely of human experience, turned up high. I don’t know how director Taika Waititi did it. Pure genius.
SPOILER ALERT: This is the very last scene of the movie. It completely gutted me. They dance the story out to David Bowie singing a gorgeous version of “Heroes” in German. While the closing credits ran, I wanted to fall to the ground and sob and sob and sob, not because I was sad, but because the movie had touched something animalistic at my core, which I can only describe as an original sadness/emotion for the Entirely of Human Experience.
This final scene is followed by this:
If you tap the ❤️ icon at the top or bottom of this post, you’ll make my day and help more people find us. xo
T
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼🤩🤩🤩