DANCE ON, DEAR ONES
I saw a great quote from author Sherrilyn Kenyon, which I’ll paraphrase:
It’s not about running for shelter when it storms; it’s about learning to dance in the rain.
Her concept got me to thinking about the state in which many of us find ourselves at one time or another: allegorically outside, uncomfortable, unsheltered. If one is lucky and possessed of a positive nature, the inner survivor kicks in just in time. Wait! Open an umbrella and channel Gene Kelly!*
For many of us, though, the struggle with feeling like unprotected outsiders is a lifelong struggle…some sunny days, even more rainy ones. Some thirty years after the Stonewall Riots in NYC touched off a tsunami of gay community protest across the country, President Clinton declared June as National Pride Month (1999). President Obama later expanded the declaration to include the entire LGBTQ+ community (2011). Over the last forty or fifty years, legislation has assured the LGBTQ+ community of many rights they demanded.
But hearts and minds change more slowly. Gaining real acceptance in the subterranean arena of private opinion remains more difficult, moving glacially because it’s rarely exposed to the light.
Dance on, Dear Ones. Embrace one another and everyone who truly loves you. Find those puddles, stomp in them, and dance on …despite those who may not love you, do not seek to know you, who will not try to understand you. If they cannot join the conga line, it is truly their loss. Dance on anyway.
~.~
I devoted many chapters of my novel To the Next Home Run to a character who has become one of my favorite characters ever. Here’s a brief excerpt (identities deleted to preserve certain reveals in the story):
[She] lowered herself into the seat beside him. “_____, look at me.” Her voice was low and soft and he saw for the first time a look of vulnerability in her face. “I thought you knew what the Transit Club was from the first time you came in. You really had no idea?” She sat back and cocked her head at him. “Am I not the same woman you laughed with and treated like a queen five minutes ago?”
[He] almost said, “That’s rich,” but he glimpsed the hope in her eyes and, with a mighty effort, stifled his irony. Lacking a comeback, he remained speechless.
“You treated me like I mattered and that was special. I don’t get treated like I’m special in a good way very often. Most of my family, well. . . until a couple of years ago, I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere anymore. Now I do. These people here are my family now, pretty much. I––well, sort of began to include you in that.”
He looked at his erstwhile angel-from-Heaven. Did I see…just what I wanted to see? She had crashed to earth with a thud. In his mind’s eye, feathers still fluttered about her, his image of her no longer accompanied by the sounds of his mother’s piano or pealing bells or anything like them.
©copyright 2023 by Jayne M. Adams
It was, I assure you, his loss. Even though they’re both fictional people I created, I was saddened by his clumsiness and blindness as I wrote the scene. And uplifted by her quiet dignity. I thought she might go on and find her way, to dance in the rain––as beautifully as anyone, ever. But even I didn’t know that for sure until later. . . .
~.~
*For those of you born after, say 1980–– who may never have been exposed to the movie Singin’ in the Rain––check it out on YouTube and be delighted.