October 6, 1998.

I'm still listening to Marilyn Manson. On the glammier songs, I can close my eyes & see Stacy dancing, just like at the Cave.

This is my little way of saying last night rocked.

We started out in Sneaky Dee's, slugging down the house beer & amusing each other. Midway through the evening, Sven pulled out a bag of candy to break the sour spell of the beer, including orange penguins, every one of which had been carefully decapitated. (What is it with me & penguins lately?) I can't remember the last time I've felt so enthusiastic about eating candy...definitely not since high-school. It was just a part & parcel of the whole night...a giddy rush of various pleasures with bare inches in which to pant & perspire.

I tested a theory of Sister Sunshine's last night: I purposely kept on brown cords & a maroon shirt, on the idea that dressing up makes one focus on one's presentation to the world, rather than one's enjoyment of the dancing. And it worked. Not only did I dance myself into a stomach stitch, but I enjoyed a night completely free of creepy come-ons. It feels good to sweat through a shirt & not worry over-much about hand-washing a nice article of clothing the next morning.

Aaron was there too, and I felt like the biggest dork about turning down all his Dance Cave invitations last year - I could've been doing this forever, damn it! We didn't have a chance to talk much over the pounding disco beats, but he did remark that I was smiling a lot more this year. I am happier, but I'm not as relaxed (and I was never that relaxed to begin with). I'm just a little freaked out by the intensity of my emotions now. And of course I stopped believing in happy endings some time ago.

Irrelevant to the point, however. Which is that last night, I saw the rarest of transformations, and I saw it happen to 2 different people simultaneously. There's a moment when a dancer will give themselves completely to the music and just dance. It doesn't always happen, but when it does, you can't mistake it for anything else. I saw Palaver & Stacy both go critical during a Cult song, and the really cool thing is that it feels as good to watch as it does to be the one transformed.

The rest of the night was a blur of sweat, near-exhaustion, almost-forgotten disco, that Dr. Who song, fish-out-of-water goths, and a groove that I'm still partly in. Unfortunately, Stacy paid in blood for our fun, but she should be okay now. The cut was shallow, but showy. Just the opposite of the night, in fact.