They have the time, the time of their life
I saw a man, he danced with his wife
In Chicago1
Let’s Do The Stroll
During one halcyon period, Julie2 and I had, instead of a house in the suburbs and two children, a 38th story apartment on Lake Shore Drive and two offices in the Loop, hers at the Sears Tower and mine in one of those Michigan Avenue buildings with a bank and a mediocre restaurant at street level and office suites inhabited by shrinks and dentists filling the other floors.
Although we had, by that time, been married at least three years, we still awoke each morning moderately surprised and immoderately happy just to discover each other in the same bed.
Just after noon on a sunny spring day during this period, we were walking along Michigan Avenue on our lunch breaks, my arm around her waist, doing our best imitation of hard-working (which we definitely were), hip and trendy (which we were not, despite our concerted efforts) Yuppies making their way in the big city.
Crossing the Chicago River, we were in front of the Wrigley Building on a well populated sidewalk when I spontaneously3 lifted her hand over her head, twirled her in a fashion that would have won the approval of my instructors at the Pink Barn Dance Studio in Tulsa (where I took a year of lessons as a 7th grader), lowered her nearly to the pavement4 in a flamboyant dip, pulled her back to the vertical, squeezed her body close to mine, exchanged a quick kiss, and then eased on down the road to the applause of the crowd – who may have just been clapping in relief that I didn’t smash Julie’s head like a melon against the sidewalk.5
I never did anything like that before, never did anything like it again. But, for one shining moment, …
The Trigger For Today’s Post
In the 1930s, Freud famously wrote to Marie Bonaparte,6
The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”
A similar query into the female psyche elicited this response from ThisIsMary at View From A Farm House Window:
True beyond water seeking the lowest level, that the sun will rise and set to rise again, true even beyond God’s great “I Am,” American women want to have one moment in their lives when they are Cinderella at the ball dancing with Prince Charming.
And that exquisite and confident response led to me recall walking with Julie on Michigan Avenue one especially fine Spring day.
- From: “Chicago (That Toddling Town)” – Lyrics by Fred Fisher [↩]
- Julie Showalter was a prize-winning writer and my much-beloved, fiercely smart, wickedly sexy wife, who died in 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. There are many other posts about her and her writing in this blog. For information, see Julie Showalter FAQ [↩]
- This spontaneity was a notably singular and transient phenomenon; I am not now, nor have I ever been considered of the “spontaneous” sort. My hypothesis is that I was surreptitiously drugged, either by the CIA or the hippies, for reasons not yet apparent, with an inhibition-dissolving pharmaceutical. [↩]
- I was, one must remember, younger then and agile enough to perform athletic feats such as bending over or rising from a chair without uttering groans or wincing [↩]
- Given that Julie had no warning about what was transpiring and was stuck with me for a partner, the smart money, I now realize, would have been on a catastrophic finale. I also suspect that in these less innocent, post-YouTube days, folks are so jaded that the polite reactions to that twirl and dip would be along the lines of “Is that all you’ve got?” while the less genteel commentary would range from dismissive insults to scatological abuse. [↩]
- Marie Bonaparte, who was treated by Freud and who paid the ransom that allowed him to to escape from Nazi Germany to England, is, I suspect, the only individual to have been, simultaneously in fact, both a Princess and a psychoanalyst. After marrying Prince George of Greece in 1907, she was thereafter officially known, according to Wikipedia, as Princess Marie of Greece and Denmark. [↩]
I had my own answer to that eternal question. My answer always was: “A room of her own with a lock on the door.” I know for a fact that I read that in some book back during my teenage years (or a freshman lit course when we were surveying Woolf), so I can’t claim it’s an original answer. I have no idea what my source could have been. In any event, it resonated with me and I’ve remembered it all these years.
With Julie, you danced all night. What a beautiful memory.
Laiane -
You are probably right that it was Virginia Woolf.
From A Room Of One’s Own (Chapter 6):
“Here, then, Mary Beton ceases to speak. She has told you how she reached the conclusion—the prosaic conclusion—that it is necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry.”
Available online at http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91r/chapter6.html
Of course, some audacious women want both the dance and the room – and get them, which is a very good thing. Bravo, Julie and Dr. HGuy
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