Dancing Queen

Sometimes the breath of inSpiration comes in the form of the most improbable and simply silly scenes. This time it was a singing/dancing sequence from the Meryl Streep Mamma Mia! movie. My husband and I started the movie the other night after several days of working hard at keeping all the balls in the air and rotating gracefully. We plopped down on the sofa with very serious faces and sat through the first fifteen minutes convinced that the movie was the most ridiculous thing we'd ever seen. The singing was off track with the lips, the energy from the actors was this constant high buzz that never dropped to allow us time to engage, and the background was, at one point, the cheesy background of a movie playing behind a moving car. Exhaustion, more than anything else, kept us tied to the screen, both of us entirely too tired to make a different decision. At one point we each looked at each other silently questioning if it was too early to just go to bed.

And then came the scene when Meryl Streep and friends go romping through the island acquiring a parade of older, care-worn women by singing, "Dancing Queen." Now, I've sung that song myself about a million times at parties and weddings. But I'd never considered the words as if they were being sung to a slightly over middle-aged person. In the song, there's a line about being seventeen and I think my mind has always snagged on that image of yet another person singing to yet another fresh, ripe teenager. But this time I thought of Grandmomma.

My grandmother Helen died this spring. She was a happy, diligent woman who pursued her religion with the same gusto at the end of her life as she pursued it when she first found it being offered in some hidden-in-the-woods, white wood church sixty years before. While my Bible (singular) looks barely opened, hers (plural) were covered with miles of ball-point pen notes of interpretation and inspiration, daily interactions with the words I find sometimes cryptic. For her, the Bible, along with the preachers she'd learned from, offered rules. She lived by, but didn't seem to propagate, a rule that said women must wear skirts. Christian women don't go to movies. They don't lie. They take responsibility for the earth. And they don't dance.

Gasp! There it is. The rule that came blazing to my sleepy mind as about a hundred choreographed actresses came sashaying down a road to dance on a sun-soaked dock.

Don't dance.

That rule wasn't always part of her being. She said that when she fell in love with my Grandaddy he was a real party guy who loved to dance. I presume that meant he loved to dance with HER. So, that means that at some point she gave up the dancing. She embraced the mid-calf skirts and sensible shoes and stopped swinging something shaky to the music.

So that night I wondered if she ever missed it. Did she ever wonder if the rule was as silly as it seems to me right now? Did she ever go into the bathroom and hum an old diddy and shake her boombdy just because she missed the dancing? Did she ever think of herself as a sweet young thing and imagine that if she could just dance for a few minutes that she could visit with that version of herself?

Chances are, in her case, that the answer is no. Her teen years started by marrying my grandfather. Before that she lived in a house inhabited by a sometimes unfriendly father who kept things unpredictable and a stoic mother who held it all together. I imagine that for her, freedom was not associated with being young and fresh and jiggly. For her freedom came when she found rules that could offer her life boundaries she could appreciate. Freedom came when she found a world she could exercise some control over.

Maybe my life has been so luxurious, my psyche so loved and nurtured, that dancing is a delicious icing representation of freedom from care. I can dance in the kitchen and know that when I'm finished I'm fully capable of picking up where I left off before the music started. Maybe she never felt that.

In the end, I realize that that happy little number in Mamma Mia! showed me that my Grandmother was not just the version I saw, the one who could grow roses and make biscuits, the one who would cut articles out of magazines to show me when I arrived for a visit. She was also the seventeen year old person that I wish I'd known so I could have given her just a little tiny taste of being The Dancing Queen.