dance wookie, dance

Way Out West – We Love Machine

We’d come together for the fifth time that week.  Practice makes perfect, Leonard had told us.  Shadow each others’ steps.  Make it happen.  Point your toes.  Clean lines, nothing gritty, all polish, elegance etc.   Leonard was a slave-driver, to be sure, a clued-in miscreant of a genius, always following the old religion of what dance could be — nay, needed to be — for any audience.   Dance was for a civilized age, he said, for a time and mindset of decorum and beauty.  Don’t be fooled, he’d say with a tight smirk, by irregularities in the beat of the music.  Search your feelings.

We took this photo on the sixth day, the day before I quit.  It was meant to bring us together as a team, but I’d already been having dreams about a new life.  I watched the stars and thought of Parsec-speed.  I thought of blasters.  I thought of all the adventures the galaxy had to offer.  I quit dance.