In Blade Runner, my favorite ever sci-fi action adventure film, Rutger Hauer’s character (a non-human replicant) says this: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” It’s a great moment, in a film about life and what is or makes a human, human. And, as I age – I keep having my own Orion moments. Mostly they make me laugh, and on occasion, I must share, which is what I did this weekend at a dance party.
First let me say that it was a costume dance party, and for my part, I chose to wear support socks, an adult diaper and house dress along with a wig and neon orange hat. I was playing nursing home patient, complete with a four footed cane I used liberally to clear space as well as plié-ing with the best of them, all to the fabulous beat of disco music. Heavenly! I do so love to shake my booty!
To the hat I had fixed my Mondale/Ferraro pin, which refers to the 1984 Presidential election – about which more than one intelligent younger person had zero idea (one was merely 4 years old at the time) but really? Really? Really. LOL. And then, dancing, I remembered the night of Yul Brynner’s birthday, his 63rd or 65th?, at Studio 54. Michael Jackson entered through the VIP back door; I was working the dance floor coat check, shaking my booty setting up. The whole place – staff and a few early admittances only – went nuts in a subtle way as the quiet energy of the pre-opening hour shifted. All eyes went to the man whose album Thriller had come out a year or so before, and prep work ceased.
He was so skinny. Tall and thin, wearing the famous glove and a military style top over skinny jeans, although any pants on him would’ve been skinny, tbh. I felt and saw the entire room wanting to approach him, touch him, grab him. A couple of busboys did swoop toward him, as did management, leading him to the dinner for Brynner’s celebration of life (as I recall, he would die not long afterward).
The focus shift and intensity of a kind of psychic pile-on made me withdraw into shadow; I felt sorry for Jackson. No one should be that much at the mercy of so much desire and interest. So much fanaticism.
I shared this story at the dance party with a comparatively youngish man dressed up as ChatGPT. I kept poking him with my cane, screeching ‘What are you? How do these buttons work exactly?’ He loved my story. He had no clue who Mondale or Ferraro were. I don’t want to know what ChatGPT is, and if that isn’t the entire hilarious conundrum of aging, and life itself, in a nutshell, I don’t know what is. Still, all the more reason to shake it.
Let’s Dance.