The Dancing Postman
Out of the ninety five or so people here, he alone rules ...
He’s a guest at the wedding. One of us. A skinny guy. White shirt and mousey ponytail. Average height in a below average world. Not so sure about his shoe choices. A winning smile already. Any music will do. You see he has the moves. Not great. Not competition standard. But out of the seventy five people here, he alone rules. He is in command of that polished space. He’s having fun. Letting go. Good times. Just following the music that’s bursting out of a slightly unbalanced and a little too loud set of PA speakers. Yeah, we’d moved away to chat comfortably like older adults do. Have a catch up. It was way too much of a noise assault but by the time we’d returned to the room he’d hit the floor. In control. His partner in an off the shoulder jumpsuit. Complementary moves. I wonder how long she’ll last ’cos he’s in it now for the rest of the night. He’s on for a marathon. Dancers come and go but he has to have the staying power. It’s a free endurance show until the sausage roll break time comes along.
The music goes his way. Perhaps he had a quick word with the chubby guy working the mixer. The knob twiddler and sonic architect of our evening event. His DJ choices matter and I don’t quite know how he makes them but helpful requests are seldom taken seriously. These guys are working from lists based around painful experiences, poor choices and empty dance spaces. Tumbleweed moments. The floor fillers need to flow like Botox. Maybe that’s not quite how it is but once you’re a few drinks in people just start to peel themselves away from bars and tables and simply have to move to the music. This is Scotland. We can’t really dance but we can be happy. Some kind of movement may be generated. You have been warned. We’re great at clapping and mumbling misheard lyrics as we make room, respectfully, for that ubiquitous postman guy.
I don’t know why I think he’s a postman. You can’t guess a person’s career choices by their looks or their dance style, certainly not at a wedding. Snap judgements are only rough cut opinions, the should be avoided. Well maybe, but it’s going to be a bit of a hit or miss thing and who really cares? Nobody does, well not that much. We’re a random set of characters thrown into the friends and family mix. He just seems like he might be a postman and now I’m stuck with that thought. It arrived in my head without warning. Then I said it out loud. Stupid is as stupid does. Nobody really picks it up.
Back in the day there once was the Singing Postman. He didn’t dance, he sang and he scored a “novelty” hit. I doubt the dancing, possibly non postman will ever make it big. Wedding dancing is a kind of special thing, a one time event and a one time crowd. There’s no second chance. You have to make it now, tonight, in this groove. On this rockin’ little spaceship adrift in a Saturday night sky. Whatever song is played is your song, your challenge, your moment. If you can claim it. This time won’t come back around ever again but we’ll all remember, through a kind of vague alcohol fog. That’s how weddings go.
Tomorrow will come along too soon, as all tomorrows do. We will wake up, maybe a bit creaky, fuzzy in the head, a few new pains in joints and vertebrae. That’s all an age thing. The years when limbs bounced back like rubber or stretched easily like some first class M&S waistband elastic are gone. It’s all floppy, stuck in the long tail of a creaking recovery process. Unpacking and putting the pieces of last night into some kind of order before it’s all filed away under weddings, social gatherings and general get togethers. It’s a big file these days. Nice things, funny moments, some occasional trauma, possibly an argument, tittle tattle, upset tummies and headaches, saying hello and goodbye and just catching up and observing how friends may have aged or how relatives haven’t really changed their anti social habits. The minor wardrobe and hairdo mistakes and the ways people can look quite different in party clothes instead of their regular streetwear. You are aware that your eyes are still dog tired and your pupils might be dilated, or worse still have shrunk smaller to rat size and now gone all out of focus. There’s also that slight ringing in your ear.
A cup of coffee bounces you up a notch. The blurry mist lifts. Then the dancing postman, the bright star of last night’s dance floor epic springs back to mind. Like Ashley Banjo or the Duracell Bunny, forever shifting into top gear and moving on, bursting with energy and expressive hand movements. It’s as if he never quite got home. He’s there, way out across that spectral dancing landscape and moving onwards into his own personal Nirvana over a rainbow bridge. The beat goes on. Active and fully energised as Earth, Wind and Fire boom across the room at the limit of the sound system’s ability to push clarity before distortion. Now you’re up there, singing and whistling the song in this Sunday morning shower’s warm waterfall, tapping on the soap dish … “Do you remember, the 21st night of September.”