“If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution.”

That’s Emma Goldman speaking. I came of age at the time in history, the 60s and 70s, when we thought we were going to make our revolution and that dancing was going to be a very big part of it. We didn’t make the revolution but we did achieve the democratization of dancing, freeing everyone to dance any way they wanted or with (or without) any one they wanted. When you’re out on the dance floor jumping around to “Respect” who can tell who’s dancing with whom? We danced in cavernous halls to local garage bands, in dorm common rooms, at keg parties out in the woods, and in our bedrooms, in front of the mirror, practicing the moves.

Dancing is my life’s signifier. I experienced my first real kiss while dancing with a juvenile delinquent in the hall of the Unitarian Church in Colorado Springs, where I grew up. Our youth group, Liberal Religious Youth (LRY), which provided me with entrance into the world of sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, was sponsoring a dance for “disadvantaged” kids who had ended up at the youth detention center in town. I remember going home that night and lying in bed savoring the taste and texture of that incredibly sensuous thing that had happened to me. I never saw the bestower of that gift again.

LRY groups sponsored “conferences,” a euphemism for all that sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, at all the churches on the Colorado Front Range—Boulder to Pueblo. I got to dance with—and kiss as well— Denver bluesman Otis Taylor (excuse my name dropping) at one of these affairs. This was before he was actually known as a bluesman, as he must have been about 17 at the time. We danced up a storm, but I refrained from any further activity, being only 15 myself and intimidated by this tall, handsome man who was a lot more worldly than I. I never saw him again, either, until Mark and I went to his concert many years later in Albuquerque. I didn’t go up to remind him who I was; I’m sure it was a memory on my part, not his.

After high school, at Antioch, we danced all the time in the C shop, the late night café where you could eat burgers and fries to the sounds of the Stones (Let It Bleed came out in the fall of my second year; I’ll never forget following the sound of “Gimme Shelter” down the hall to the common room wondering, what is that song?), Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Janis Joplin, and all that great Detroit, Philly, and Memphis R&B. When I was 20, during Christmas vacation, my mother, sisters, and I took a trip to Mazatlan, Mexico. On New Year’s Eve we found ourselves in a discothèque across the street from the beach that was crammed full of Anglo and Mexican tourists as well as locals of all ages, from grandmothers to babies. My sisters and I soon hooked up with some vacationing students from Guadalajara and danced the night away. A grandmother came up and asked my mother to dance, so she got some action as well. We ended up reconnecting with the students after we took the train to Guadalajara, and we danced another night away on the shore of Lake Chapala drinking sangria with tequila shots.

I dropped out of Antioch after a couple of years and in my subsequent drifting I ended up in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, where I went to work for the Forest Service for a summer. There were a lot of cowboys in Cloudcroft, and I met one named Emory who taught me to how two-step and play pool at the Lodge, the famous hotel on the hill. This cowboy taught me how to ride a horse as well, so I acquired two skills highly valued in northern New Mexico where I eventually ended up.

The trip from Cloudcroft to Santa Fe was a long one, in more than just miles. At the Central Clearing House I found myself working with all the twenty-something activists fighting the coal mines in the four corners region and the subdivisions surrounding Santa Fe and Albuquerque. We threw a fund raising dance party at the Mine Shaft bar in Madrid where the Family Lotus, Liza Gilkyson’s first band, played for all the Santa Fe elite, hippie entrepreneurs, and assorted desert misfits that comprised that heady town in the 1970s.  

From Santa Fe I moseyed down to Albuquerque and the University of New Mexico, where the dance scene revolved around Okie Joe’s, the student bar on the corner of University and Central. There, every Tuesday and Friday nights during happy hour (ten cent beer, dollar shots) the backroom blared “Brown Sugar” on the sound system or Cadillac Bob performed live. Everyone I knew went there, and Mark and I made it there as well on our first date. I discovered that he loved to dance, too, which was a prerequisite for any serious relationship between the two of us.

We lived for 20 years in Placitas, the former land grant community just north of Albuquerque that morphed into yuppiedom (see “You Can’t Go Home Again”) before our very eyes. Before that happened, though, there was plenty of dancing. A couple from New Orleans had regular dance parties where they turned us on to that city’s R&B/funk of the Meters, Allen Toussaint, the Wild Tchoupitoulas, and the Subdudes. At our house one New Year’s Eve we danced until two in the morning and finally had to let the fire go out to get everyone to leave. There were dancehalls everywhere: Placitas’s own Thunderbird Bar, where Tracey Nelson and Mother Earth, Cadillac Bob, and Sonny Terry and Brownie Magee played; Rosa’s Cantina in Algodones; the Golden Inn, where I heard Toots and the Maytals (it was so crowded you couldn’t dance but just moved as part of the group pulse); and the Line Camp up north where Buddy Guy and Junior Wells tore it up.

Once we made the move to El Valle we had to incorporate Ranchera dancing into our repertoire, which wasn’t very hard as it’s basically a polka move with a little salsa thrown in. And Mark learned how to two-step. We went to dances at the Indian gaming casinos, weddings, graduations, and Santa Fe concerts (the best was when Joe King Carrasco came up from Puerta Vallarta and played the Santa Fe Brewing Company to a crowd of dancing fools). What made it even more fun, though, was the fact that our neighbor and village patrón, Tomás, loved to dance, so when it was his turn to be mayordomo of the church he celebrated the village feast day with a dance in his barn and took us on Sunday afternoons to Las Vegas where we danced at the local bar.

Then there was El Grupo, our radical compadres who were fighting both the Forest Service and urban environmentalists over community access to forest resources: the environmentalists were promoting Zero Logging on public lands, regardless of who was doing the logging and to what extent, while the Forest Service was imploding from ineptitude and institutional paralysis. El Grupo—activist community loggers, grazers, acequia parciantes, journalists, lawyers, and academics both brown and white—used to go dancing at the Chamisa Lounge in Española to let off steam and enjoy each others’ company amidst the lowriders, ex-convicts, and regular working class blokes who patronized the bar.

Mark had an extensive 45 record collection—rock, R&B, blues, Motown, pop— and when we still had a turntable that could play them, and before they warped, we’d put them on and dance around the house. Later we danced to albums, then tapes, then CDs. He died before I got Wifi and began playing Pandora on my iPod. I have a favorite dance station, “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted,” that plays all the great R&B and Motown hits that we loved to dance to. I miss Mark the most when I find myself dancing around the house to “It’s Too Late To Turn Back Now” or “Be My Baby.”  They say that couples who are together for many years start to look like each other. Mark and I, together for 34 years, only looked like each other when we danced, a synchronized dance team that will never be replicated. On this second anniversary of his death I can still dance by myself, to all the music that evokes these memories, and while it is soothing to my soul, it also breaks my heart.

A Dog's Life

I was in Albuquerque the other day with my two dogs, Paco and Star, who know nothing about being in town, so I took them to the dog park as a facsimile of country life. You’ll notice that I use the pronoun “who” when referring to them: considering how often the word “that” is used instead of “who” when referring to people, I think it’s OK to extend the little used “who” to pets “that” we treat as humans.

While I was at the dog park I met up with this lovely Mexicana, a volunteer at the local animal shelter, who was there with six little dogs, all damaged goods. Four of them were hers, the ones she had rehabilitated at the shelter and adopted, and two were “unadoptables:” one who bit other dogs (she had trained him to keep a ball in his mouth so if he opened it to bite he’d lose his pacifier) and the other whose cast had recently been removed but he continued act as if it hadn’t (no one wanted to adopt a cripple who was actually mental).

She told me in vivid detail each dog’s abuse history. I won’t go into it here, but suffice it to say it illustrated the Hobbesian interpretation of human nature. It also elicited a conversation of how the cultural differences in both Mexico, her home, and northern New Mexico, my home, are revealed in the way humans relate to animals. She didn’t accede to political correctness when discussing a dog’s life in Mexico, but I tried to explain it in more utilitarian terms: a dog is supposed to protect the property or round up the cows while a cat catches mice and “rattas” (gophers).

I cop to the bourgeoisfication of owning animals. Sometimes I go so far as to think there must be something wrong with anyone (of my class) who doesn’t own at least one: Mark brought home more strays than I did; both my sons are smitten; my mother adored the two kittens I dumped on her in college; and my two closest friends have four dogs each. My father, who I’ve already written about (see The Swim Team), claimed he was allergic to animal hair, so we had to make do with a parakeet.

After I dumped the kittens on my mother I also dumped college and acquired my first dog, Chani, who I dragged across the country several times, including a trip on the subway from the East Village to the Bronx (the subway police made me get off at Times Square and find a box to put her in; today they would have just kicked us off). I found Judge, a huge Husky-type mix, in the woods of eastern Oregon where I was working as a seasonal employee for the Forest Service. It took me many tries to get near him, but when I finally got him in the car he collapsed and had to be carried in and out of my cabin for a week because his paws were rubbed raw. I brought him back to New Mexico and had him until the infamous dog poisoning in Placitas, in 1981, when some deranged person set out meat laced with poison and killed hundred of dogs over the course of a couple of days.

Waldo, who looked like the movie personality Benji, also succumbed to the poisoning, but he wasn’t strictly my dog. He lived with three families in the village and took turns gracing us with his presence. We tried to tame him—let him sleep inside, took him in the car to go for hikes—but he bought into the philosophy that “it takes a village.”

We also rescued Dutch, an Australian shepherd, from somebody’s bathroom in a trailer park (they left him there all day while they were at work), and adopted a dog named Pooper, from friends with too many other dogs, and renamed him Scooter. Our El Valle dogs were all rescued, too: Luther, after being hit by a car in Taos, and Django, who someone dumped in a culvert on our road. Mark picked up Sammy, a cocker spaniel, running down the streets of Chimayó after folks at one of the stores near the Santuario told him, “You better take him before the dog lady gets him,” the implication being that while the dog lady meant to be kind by rescuing dogs, when you end up with 20 of them all living in the same yard, it’s still a dog’s life.  

The summer after Mark died I had to put Django down, as she couldn’t walk anymore, and Sammy went in December, blind, deaf, and incontinent. Before Django and Sammy died I vowed that I would wait awhile before I got another dog. I gave away my chickens, too, thinking that for the first time in 40 years I could go away on a trip without having to get a housesitter or persuade someone to babysit my dogs or cats (there were 15 cats through the years, but I’ll save that for another story). And this time I was going to choose the dog, not have it choose me.

Or have them choose me, which they of course did. I rescued Paco up in La Junta Canyon when I was there with a bunch of folks looking at the diversion dams that carry water from the Rio Pueblo watershed to the Rio Mora watershed (this is another story as well). He looked like a blue heeler puppy (maybe he jumped out of a rancher’s pickup; heelers are definitely the dog of choice in northern New Mexico) but he turned out tall and lean and has no interest in cows. Star, who, like Waldo, isn’t strictly my dog, is also a heeler mix. She actually belongs to my across-the-road neighbor who got her to keep his other dog company, but she prefers Paco’s company and basically lives here. The deal was sealed when I started letting her sleep in the house (she’d already made herself at home in the house via the dog door, which I close at night). And while I sometimes take her to Albuquerque and the dog park, she really prefers El Valle, so I don’t take offense when she decides to stay home and check in with the neighbor.

So there you have it. I figure animal pets are like children: you take what you get and love them all.