Dance Like Nancy

I wish I wasn’t afraid to dance like Nancy.

Just to put myself out there and not care what people said. Or worse, thought.

Many of you may know Nancy from way ‘back in the day’ at Shiver School. Or when she used to cook the biscuits every morning at Hardee’s.

Nancy is different. She acts differently. She talks differently.

A lot of people pull away from her. They stand over against the wall or in the corner, pointing and snickering.

And that’s too bad, because despite her outward appearance, Nancy is one of the kindest people you’ll ever meet.

She certainly is one of the happiest.

I saw Nancy at the street dance this weekend. She was walking towards me in the middle of the street. I wasn’t sure if she would even remember who I was.

It had been a long time since I talked to her.

That didn’t matter to Nancy. To her, there are no strangers.

“Hi, Nancy,” I said when she was a few feet away.

Nancy’s face broke out in a big toothy grin and gave me a tight hug.

“Hey, baby,” she said. Then she grabbed one of my hands and pulled me towards the stage on the other end of the street.

“Wanna’ dance?”

“Maybe later,” I said, knowing full well that once my butt hit the bottom of my folding chair, it would stay there until we were ready to go home.

My inhibition didn’t bother Nancy. She hugged me again and told me she loved me and she was off to dance.

By herself.

In humans, inhibition is generated in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. Most people outgrow it by the time they’re six years old.

Some people never do.

I set up my little blue folding chair up next to the sidewalk and plopped down it. The band was wailing away on some old song from the 70s. There was only one person on the street dancing.

Nancy.

And boy, was she dancing.

Nancy had some pretty awesome moves. If I had agreed to join her out on the ‘dance floor’, she would definitely be showing me up right now.

A few more people wandered into street over the next hour or so. Nancy danced with all of them.

They were smiling and laughing and seemed to be having so much fun.

I was almost tempted to get up out of my chair, tighten up my arm sling and join them.

Almost.

It’s not that I can’t dance. I can. Or at least I used to could dance back in high school and college.

I spent a few thousand hours gyrating my hips in various clubs around Athens and Atlanta in my younger, trimmer days. Nobody ever told me I sucked. But neither did anyone ever tap me on the shoulder and ask me to leave because I was scaring the other patrons.

So, I wasn’t worried about being able to dance. What I was worried about was that somebody would actually see me dancing.

In fact, there are a lot of things I don’t do in public because someone might see me.

Like take my shirt off at the beach. Nobody wants to see that.

Or eat a Sloppy Joe. With my shirt off.

But that stuff doesn’t seem to both Nancy.

 

Dance in public. No problem. Eat a messy sandwich, without a napkin. Bring it on.

 

I watched Nancy do some shimmy shacks as the band played Brick House. And I wondered how she managed to be so self confident.

Wasn’t she at least a little concerned that some bystander might laugh at her?

What was it about Nancy that made her not care what anybody thought? And makes the rest of us mortified if someone sees us chewing?

The band started playing Stevie Wonder’s Superstition and Nancy was whirling around in a circle, swinging her arms. If people were watching and judging her, Nancy didn’t seem give a gnat’s ass.

I smiled and wished I had the nerve to be like that. What had I missed in my life because I was embarrassed someone might see me.

How many things had I not tried because I thought I might look silly? How many times had I watched instead of joining in? How many friends had passed me by?

Yeah, Nancy is odd. She’s awkward and she is loud.

But, she’s also free.

Free to love, to laugh, to eat. She’s free to dance as much as she wants.

It’s a freedom that only comes when you don’t care what other people think.

It’s something that very few of us are.

Fearless.

I wonder what my life would have been like if I wasn’t afraid to dance like

Nancy.