Tag: Dancing with the Stars

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Dancing with the Stars, by Ray S

Thursday morning, God or the Gods in the heavens had their priorities set for the occasion and the sun shone mightily.  
The “house” was packed, it was SRO. The devout, the devoted, those titillated by remembered “tittle-tattle”, all gathered for the celebration of a good friend who had found another path to follow, an everlasting journey, more than likely in a bright red Mercedes with a WARHOL license plate.
The paraphrase of an old Tin Pan Alley tune, “the hip hooray, the ballyhoo, that’s the lullaby of Broadway.”
It was solemn godly, holy, prayerful, and joyous at St. Andrews house this day.
For those of the uninitiated, the opening production was splendid theatre; for the true believers, it was as it should be: elegantly proper and appropriate. It was like an opening night and a closing night combined, and the star was taking his curtain calls.
Memory time recalled a fascinating career in so many public endeavors, the many people and places of a life well lived. A loving family and, of course, the names (and sometimes even the addresses) of scores of friends and their circumstances.
The remembrances offered by friends at Telling Your Story were so very heartfelt. To me, none could have been more poignant than Orville’s “Amen.”
The pomp and circumstance concluded. The mourners are left with their thoughts and grief, or loving joy. On this latter note, I know that there now is a shining new star “Dancing with the Stars.” The houselights have dimmed, the curtain has fallen, this show is over, but his star sparkles brilliantly in the firmament forever.
Goodbye, dear friend.
(Author’s note: Irreverent as I may appear, no disrespect of the Church and its traditions and dogma are meant. It’s just that I knew Randy Wren as a happy, wonderful showman and sensed his love affair with the theatre. Amen.)
© 24 Jul 2017 
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My First LGBT Acquaintance, by Pat Gourley

I saw that today’s topic was actually Dancing with the Stars. I am aware that this is the name of a long-standing television series of the same name that I think involves teams of contestants in competitive-dancing with often B-grade celebrities. And I must admit I have never watched a single minute of this show and I mean no offense to anyone who enjoys it. Really how can somewhat like me who is addicted to reruns of The Big Bang Theory and the Golden Girls throw shade at anyone else’s TV viewing habits?

I could I suppose make a big stretch and turn ‘dancing with the stars’ into a metaphor for one of my past particularly enjoyable LSD adventures but instead I’ll write a few lines on last week’s topic: My First GLBT Acquaintance. Let me say right out of the box I have no idea who my first real GLBT acquaintance was since like all of us of a certain age I was birthed into the stifling cauldron of a falsely presumed heterosexual universe. We were in many ways unrecognizable to one another until we demanded to be called by our real names. A nearly universal experience we all relate to was the question of whether or not we were alone asking “am I the only one who is this way”. Our first acquaintance would I hope for most of us be a glorious answer to that question.

As I was writing this and had Pandora playing in the background I was unaware of any tune until Lou Reed’s masterpiece Walk on the Wild Side just came on. Released in 1972 this opus chronicles the adventures of a cast of characters all headed to New York City and a ‘walk on the wild side’.

I would take the liberty to say that through transexuality, drug use, male prostitution and oral sex they may have all been looking for and perhaps found that first GLBT acquaintance. Holly, Candy, Little Joe, Sugar Plum Fairy and Jackie all seem to have been based on real people from Reed’s life in NYC back then. All of whom I would say were very queer people.

We were fortunate in this SAGE Story Telling Group to get a glimpse of this albeit dangerous but deliciously exciting world Reed describes in his song through the frequent writings of a dear friend who died recently. As he related to us on several occasions his walks on the wild side started in the tearooms of downtown Denver department stores but would eventually be played out most emphatically on the streets of NYC. He often honestly provided glimpses into this world, that like it or not, is an integral part of our collective and frequently personal queer history. Thank you, dear friend!

For the sake of this piece I am going to say that “acquaintance” implies a mutual recognition that we are both queer as three-dollar bills. When using this definition the task of identifying my first acquaintance is much easier. This first person I suppose also represents my own personal “walk on the wild side”. As I have written about on previous occasions this ‘acquaintance” was a man 20 years my senior who I had been passive-aggressively courting for a year. We took a real ‘walk on the wild side’ and had sex (my first!) in the biology lab of my Catholic High School festooned with crucifixes on the wall. It was Easter week and I was a soon to graduate Senior. I am eternally in debt to this man for launching in very loving fashion my great ongoing gay adventure.

If there has been one thing that our liberation efforts the past century have provided it is that many but certainly not all new ‘recruits’ to the queer world do not have to have that first acquaintance involve a ‘walk on the wild side’. The fruits of success I suppose though work remains to be done and for some us perhaps a sense of nostalgia for a long gone but often very exciting times.

© July 2017

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

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Dancing with the Stars, by Gillian

I won’t be. Dancing with the stars, that is. No matter how they beg, I will not be on that show. Not, I must confess, that I have ever watched it; but I get the concept. Star-worship is just not something that has ever been in me. Living through the height of the fan-club phase, I never even thought of joining one. There are very few famous people I would cross the street to meet. It’s not that I have anything against the rich and famous and fabulously good-looking. It’s simply that they hold no fascination for me just because they are household names. Every one of us in this room has a life story that is every bit as fascinating, in it’s own way, as theirs.

Perhaps my attitude originated in my essentially TV- and movie-free childhood. I had little temptation to idolize. Or maybe it stems from my parents’ attitude towards the stars of the day: royalty, bigwigs in the Church of England hierarchy, the local landed gentry. They must always be spoken to politely, and that was where it ended. They would be respected when they earned respect. We were every bit as good as they were and there would be no figurative bowing and doffing of caps. This was a burgeoning feeling in England in the 1940’s and ’50’s when the winds of equality were blowing strong. So, when I was about twelve and Princess Margaret was to visit our school, I was a little apprehensive over my mother’s reaction to the fact that we were all taught, in some detail, the correct way to bow and curtsey, and were expected to do so. But, somewhat to my surprise, Mum was fine with it. Apparently there were certain protocols she was willing to go along with. What mattered, she explained, was not so much external expressions of deference as internal knowledge of equality. A wise woman in many ways, my mother.

What I do value is dancing with the real stars; those of the firmament, sparkling and dancing above our heads. In the days of our youth, the world was not subjected to the vast explosions of artificial light which afflict it today. In my youth we had no electricity where we lived, and no form of outdoor lighting for many miles. On a rare clear English night, often also a cold one, Mom and I would lie on our backs on the lawn, usually huddled under a blanket, and she would point out constellations to me and relate their mythical stories. She only knew a few of the commonly-familiar ones, so the rest she made up and created stories to fit the shapes she saw. Half the time I couldn’t see what she saw, it was harder than one of her other favorite pastimes of agreeing on what clouds looked like, but I went along with her imagination to hear her inventive stories. My mother was just fine as long as she remained far from any form of reality.

In college in the north of England, long before the cities overgrew the hills as they have now, a group of us sometimes went up on the dark moorlands to stargaze. We always spent a couple of hours in the pub on the way, so our imaginings were rarely inhibited.

I have stared in wonder at the starry sky above Australia, South America, and South Africa. There is something very special about the night skies of the Southern Hemisphere. The stars somehow seem so much more numerous, and so much closer than we are used to. They take my breath away.

During the twenty-five years that Betsy and I camped all over this country in out VW van, we frequently danced with the stars. Many camping spots, especially National Forest Campgrounds, are about as far as you can get from city lights these days, and perfect for communing with the heavens. For some strange reason which we never did figure out, nine times out of ten, wherever we camped, The Big Dipper appeared at night to be clearly seen from our back window. Rarely the front, hardly ever the side windows, but almost inevitably if we woke in the middle of the night there was the Dipper, above us as we lay with our heads right below the back window.

We liked to settle in well before dark, so had no idea where the Dipper would be when we chose the site and decided exactly how to park for the night. We actually never thought about it. Yet there it would be, in the night, almost as regular as clockwork.

At Randy Wren’s funeral last week, his Rector said,

“Randy lived large.”

He did. If you have any belief in an afterlife in any form, you have to think that Randy is dancing with the stars; whatever that means to you. If anyone can do it, Randy can.

Once upon a time, Frank Sinatra crooned a popular song about the stars.

Fly me to the moon
And let me play among the stars….

It went on a couple of lines later,

In other words hold my hand,
In other words, Darling kiss me …..

As long as I have My Beautiful Betsy to hold my hand and kiss me, I shall forever dance with the stars.

© July 2017

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

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Dancing with the Stars, by Betsy

For what reason I do not know, but this topic brings to mind images from my childhood. We can all remember being outside in the dark of night, lying on the ground on our backs looking up at the stars. If you look at a group of stars long enough, they start to dance. At least they look as if they are dancing-jumping from here to there in a very lively fashion. Of course we know the stars are not dancing, rather our eyes or brains are playing tricks on us. But I felt that vision from the past deserved space on this page.

Another image from childhood relates to dancing, but certainly not with any stars. In about the 6th grade in my homogeneous, non-diversified community of Mt Lakes, New Jersey, a suburban very small enclave within commuting distance of New York City, most of the boys and girls in my class at school were enrolled into dancing classes at the local community church.

The dances that were taught were the fox trot, the waltz, the rhumba, and the jitterbug. This was about 1946. Perhaps our parents’ motivation for sending us to dancing school included their belief that young children should be distracted from the news reports coming out of Europe in the aftermath of the 2nd world war revealing the horrors and the reality of the conflict.

More likely our parents sent us to dancing school not so much to learn to dance well, but to prepare us to enter the social world and to learn the proper decorum and social graces needed for high school years and beyond. Anyway, it was the thing to do and all my friends attended with me on those Saturday afternoons.

This was strictly ballroom dancing of course. So equal numbers of girls and boys were needed. My partners usually were Tom Brackin and Mousey MacMillan. STARS—they were not. I preferred Tom to Mousey, but somehow I always ended up with Mousey. I never did know what his real name was……

During college and early adulthood I mostly danced with the man I eventually married and who was the father of my three children. I can’t call it dancing as I think back on it, however. It was more like a shuffling of the feet, in place, more or less, or not at all, in time with the slow, dreamy music while in a bear hug type embrace. As for the jitterbug neither one of us ever felt confident enough to do it in public in spite of the dancing lessons of earlier years.

During the two decades of raising my children, I don’t think I danced much at all. I probably didn’t even think about it. So there was a huge gap of time between the pre marriage dancing and entering the world of dancing that the lesbian bars presented.

When I came out, never mind I was middle aged, dancing became very important. I was looking for some stars. If the dance floor was the place to find my star, then on the dance floor was the place to be. In the excitement of finding myself and my new life it seems at first I was somewhat blinded —not by the stars I danced with but by the ones that were in my eyes.

As the next several years raced by I learned a lot, stuff that I had been rather sheltered from in my youth. As a fledgling lesbian, dancing was an important part of my life. This is one of the few places where, I learned, we go to meet women—places where you dance—the Three Sisters, Divine Madness, Ms. C’s.

It was at Divine Madness one night that I did in fact meet the love of my life, the one with whom I would spend the rest of my life. It was not so much the dancing. She had other qualities and characteristics that attracted me. But dancing with her was fun. Thanks to the Mt. Lakes Community Church dance classes and Mousey McMillan, I could be waltzed around the dance floor as long as she was leading and she didn’t mind that I counted under my breath—1,2,3,1,2,3— rather than trying to converse. The conversation could come later after the dance. “This woman is very special,” I thought.

“Can you do the Two-Step?” she asked one Saturday night. She, being a lover of country music was a fan of this lively jig. The only two step I had ever known or heard of was the Aztec Two Step, some unpleasant digestive ailment I picked up while traveling in Mexico one summer.

“I’m not familiar with it,” I said, “but I’m game to try if you lead and don’t mind counting aloud for me if I need help.” Yes, I did need lots of help, but somehow it didn’t matter. I was dancing with a STAR—my star— and we’ve been dancing ever since.

© 23 July 2017

About the Author

Betsy has been active in the GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver Women’s Chorus, OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change), and the GLBT Community Center. She has been retired from the human services field for 20 years. Since her retirement, her major activities have included tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a volunteer instructor with the National Sports Center for the Disabled, reading, writing, and learning. Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage. She has a close relationship with her three children and four grandchildren. Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her life with her partner of 30 years, Gillian Edwards.