You Used To Love To Dance- Melissa Ethridge

You Used to Love to Dance- Melissa Ethridge
Lying in a city night
A million fingers tingling my skin
Out there in the sea tonight
I thought I saw you clutching your sin
You rolled me over long ago
And told me you were strong enough to go
You needed more than this lover's dream
You need the steel and the concrete beams in your life
In your life

We laughed and drank in the jukebox light
And we tore the rug in that downtown dive
Every Saturday night
For fifty cents we'd dance all night long
And each new tune we said that's our song
Oh it felt so right
Well ecstasy ain't free
But compromise is chance
I remember how
You used to love to dance

They told me you have found your love
You moved in locked up and put out your blues
Well all God's children got to grow up
And play house make vows to hang up their shoes
Do you sit and talk over coffee cups
Do headline mornings satisfy and fill you up
I kept your eyes and your cigarette kiss
You couldn't keep the lies the adrenalin bliss in your life
In your life

We laughed and drank in the jukebox light
And we tore the rug in that downtown dive
Every Saturday night
For fifty cents we'd dance all night long
And each new tune we said that's our song
Oh it felt so right
Well ecstasy ain't free
But compromise is chance
I remember how
You used to love to dance

I'm gonna go out tonight
I'm gonna drive up to the hill
I'm gonna dive on into those city lights
And I'm gonna dance, dance
Dance till I get my fill

We laughed and drank in the jukebox light
And we tore the rug in that downtown dive
Every Saturday night
For fifty cents we'd dance all night long
And each new tune we said that's our song
Lord it felt so right
But ecstasy ain't free
And compromise is chance
I remember how
You used to love to dance

As anyone who knows me knows, I tend to live my life in a weird parellel to the art I consume, though I'm going to be using the word "art" quite loosely here. While I'm not quite sure if this is the real reason, I'm going to blame it on being a relatviely smart kid with lots of ideas and more access to books, movies, music, and televison than I even did my peers. While in some ways the art I consume does tend to mirror my views on life, it also tends to point out to me and make more concrete in me ideas that were only half-formed before. And I have to credit this art with sometimes getting me out of funks and leaving me with that nugget of inspiration to help with later funks as well.

This song is one of my favorite songs by Melissa Ethridge. I was not quite a teenager when she came out of the closet and it was quite a big deal at the time. For a young, rock-loving, wanna-be musician like myself, who was also starting to realize that she might be not-straight as well, she was a huge inspiration. I remember taping her MTV Unplugged when I was 12 on the spare tv and our beta VCR. (When we sold our 3 bedroom house before we bought another home, we moved into a 2 bedroom apartment. Because my mother didn't allow me to have a television in my bedroom, I could only watch something other than what my parents did on a different tv in our living room. Needless to say, it cut down drastically on me watching things I shouldn't.) I was reading a couple books on Bruce Springsteen and his early career at the time for a school project and I was overjoyed when he was on her Unplugged special, singing "Born To Run" with her. Within the next year, I bought all her CDs prior to Yes I Am, which I already had.

I think I always liked this song because it spoke to something I had always felt. I never wanted to "settle down". I wanted to be wild and crazy and live an unexpected life. At the time when I got this CD, we had just moved to the suburbs of this Small City and I was surrounded by this suburban dream of a nice house and nice job and nice family. While I knew several girls in high school who had big career-oriented dreams and ambitions for their lives, I didn't know any of these girls, or at least was not aquainted with them and their dreams, in the middle school where I started out. This was the place where, in the first class of my first day, my partner on a class exercise said that she was happy that we were done with it with time to spare to talk about the really important things like guys and make-up. Needless to say, even though I knew we had moved here so that i would get a better education and live in a better neighborhood, I despised it. In fact, I dreamed of the day when I turned 16 and got my first car so that I could disappear again into the Big City we had previously lived in, where I would live a precarious existence, having to finish high school and work enough to live on my own. But even in high school, where I knew some very ambitious college and career-oriented girls, I don't think I ever really knew anyone, male or female, who wanted to embrace the messy, not well-off but comfortable, and full of artistic integrity life that I wanted. That I still want to this day, though I knew now more of how hard it is to have that.

I also liked this song so much because I already felt betrayed by this time by people in my life who I thought would want that kind of life but didn't. I guess you grow up assuming that the people who instill certain values in you are consciously instilling those values in you and that they themselves will live by those values. Also that you assume that the way of life that you adore when you see it in someone else and that you aspire to in the future really makes the person living it happy and will always make them happy. None of that is really true and I think now that feeling that way largely comes from being a kid and not realize that the people you put on a pedestal are up their because you put them there not because they should be. Because really no one should be as we are all human, with all the messy, illogical, contridictory desires, flaws, hopes, dreams, and mind-changing that comes along with that. But at the time, I felt betrayed by this. (To be honest, still do sometimes.) For so much of my life, my godfather, who was one of the closest males to me during my young life, lived in the city proper and dated multiple women at the same time. I loved his freedom and the life that he had. When I was 8 though, he met and fell in love with a woman who he would marry and settle down with over the next 2 years or so. It probably didn't help that she had a daughter who was just a year older than me. When they started living together, he moved into her house in the suburbs. After a disasterous vacation two family vacation, we all kinda lost touch. So, at 13, even though I knew Ethridge probably wrote this song about a female lover who left Ethridge to settle down properly with a man, I felt like it was about my godfather settling down, giving up what I thought of as a privileged life just to settle down and have a family. I kinda had similar feelings in regard to my uncle marrying and staying in the same town as my grandparents over the course of my high school years.

Recently, as I've been trying to decide how to proceed in my life, I 'rediscovered' this song while listening to an MP3 disk with lots of different albums on it. It still strikes a cord with me, though for different reasons.

I guess it was the love of that non-settled down lifestyle that made me agree to marry BT, the fact that being with him seemed to promise that I wouldn't be "settling" or "settling down." While it was that craziness and chaos that led to so many of our problems, I have to admit that it was also what brought us together. And, to compliment what my grandmother said about how he and I are both dreamers and don't always live in the real world, I never felt like I would have to "grow up, play house, make vows to hang up [my] shoes" with him. In addition to just having an open relationship, I felt like I had found someone who I could share all my dreams and fantasies with, that I wouldn't have to compromise who I really was, even though I knew we'd both have to compromise on other things. While he wasn't the first to want to marry me (or the last, as it's turned out), every other man who wanted to marry me wanted to "settle down", to have that sort of very stable household and family. And, in some ways, I know now that played a role in BT wanting to get married as well. But he was happy with the ways in which it would be crazy and messy and unstable, if for no other reason than I am all those things. But I think he was, and still is, one of the few guys who didn't see me as a project, as something to be fixed, even though, on the other hand, he never thought I'd be "like this" forever. And when he was around, I wasn't, which only reminds me of another song lyric, "Yes, and thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes/I thought it was there for good so I never tried." (Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat")

I think that "settling down" part was probably a large part of why I couldn't have stayed with TyRoy. MP recently said to me that he thought TyRoy had been giving me something which he thought he had to give me in order to keep me but that, in truth, I wasn't ready for at all. I think that's probably true. There was this big house and this comfortable life there but, whether this is true or not, I always felt like that came hand in hand with being a dutiful wife, even if we weren't married at the time. As TyRoy pointed out to me last week when I said that I never felt like he chose me but just chose to be with someone, I wasn't the only woman who wanted to live in that house. That might be true. But I would have been just as happy to not live in that house, to have stayed with my folks'. I only moved in for the period of time I was there because it was easier for us to see each other and because I thought he wanted, needed, a person living there with him. And though I might not have conveyed this as much as I wanted to, I wasn't trying to get with him, wasn't trying to be his girlfriend/wife, wasn't trying to get a commitment out of him, though I was happy, if hesitant because of experience, to take it when he offered, when the "other women who wanted to move in there" were actively working to get a commitment out of him and were actively trying to move in there. And I guess, in the begginning when things are all shiny, and after my ordeals with lies and ommision with BT, I thought I had found someone with whom I wouldn't have to "hang up my shoes" either because he wanted the openness but wasn't jealous and had shown himself not to be a liar (even by ommission), so I ignored the trade-off. "Compromise is chance", right?

And the final thing about this song, right now, that gets me, is about the jukebox. Even though I'm quite a horrible dancer and have yet to be broken of the tendency to lead, I still love to do it and don't get to do it often enough. But I love the image of two people dancing. And two people dancing to a jukebox just seems to be this terribly romantic image that I can never get out of my head. The kinda messed up thing is that I can only think of a handful of times that I've danced with my male romantic partners or a person I had a romantic interest in of either sex. I know that I've probably danced more with my uncle than I have all my romantic partners or potentials combined. I actually can't think of a single time I danced with BT. And while I'll never forget the night I met BT just because it was the night I met him, I'd always remember it for another reason if he and I had never gotten together. As in the song, the place was a dive, a little bar overlooking the highway and the river, where you had to be buzzed in. And they had a jukebox, though I doubt you probably got 3 songs out of fifty cents. But someone, probably my uncle or his boyfriend, did put some money in it and played some songs. And I danced with my uncle to Patsy Cline, who both he and my mother love. And whenever I see a couple dancing to a jukebox, I think of that.