Posted by sniffles at June 09, 2005 11:07 PMPhoebe was a marvelous dancer. Her long slim arms snaked and syncopated in mysterious choreography. With unabashed admiration Lewis mirrored her movements. She put her hands on his shoulders and drew him close. "You know what's the best advice I ever got about dancing?" she yelled over the music. "A friend told me this. He said, 'You know those gestures the stewardesses make during the safety speech? They point out the emergency exits.'" Phoebe extended her arms in a wide funnel and her hands became blades, slicing towards the far corners of the room. "'They show you where the life preservers are.'" She stretched her arms directly over her head and pointed at the life preservers with pulsing index fingers. "My friend said to me, 'We have to take our culture's eloquent gestures where we find them.'" She dipped, and her hands cut through the air like fins. "He's dead now." She crossed her wrists in front of her face, in what was perhaps a stylized gesture of mourning, embracing the memory of her dead friend.
As his clams sizzled in the wine, and Michael Jackson lamented that it was too late, Lewis dropped his knees, and raised his hands, and sliced the air. Could that possibly be the best advice about dancing anyone would ever give him? He pointed his index fingers at the life preservers. He reached up and jerked down hard on the emergency oxygen supply. He cupped one hand loosely over his mouth and passed the other behind his head, as if adjusting the elastic strap, and he breathed in deeply. He kept dancing like that for a few bars, with his eyes shut, and his arms cradling his skull.
— "Safety Speech", Cynthia Baughman (from "Getting It On: A Condom Reader").