Take off your pants, do the hippie dance!!

It's been a long time coming, I know.

So I was at this bar the other night watching the
Jeff Coffin Mu'tet, which turned out to be a mind blowing show. The dudes in this band were so stinking good, but that's to be expected when they keyboard player's brother is the keyboardist for the Allman Brothers, and the drummer's name is "Futureman 2050". Several times throughout the show, while still playing the tenor saxophone, Jeff Coffin goes over, picks up his alto sax, and starts playing them both at the same time!!! The songs they put together were phenomenal, the line up is extraordinary, and they're on a short small-venue tour so you GOTTA go check them out.

Endorsements aside, there was a part of the evening that struck me as disadvantaged*. We're in this bar, watching a jazz/funk quartet just get down and nasty right? Most people in the audience are respectable citizens of the Boone, NC or Blowing Rock, NC area...myself obviously included. So we're all having a good time, and I'm standing towards the back of the restaurant really trying to pay attention to the music. This can be serious stuff for me, people...when I'm really digging a band, I need to concentrate on the music. I'm listening, and feeling what these dudes are throwing down, and then all of a sudden I feel these little bugs jumping on me. Then as I'm brushing these body mites (i.e. crabs) off of me, I start to smell a very familiar, yet not too fond smell. yep ladies and gentlemen, the mites accompanied by the small of pachouli oil can only mean one thing when you're crammed into a little bar...some dirty, dirty hippies are heading your way.

These two dudes drifted in like hippies usually do, ambling around the bar in a sort of stupor. They saw that tbe band was playing, and where did they go to watch the band? That's right...directly in front of me. As I threw back my entire beer in an effort to avoid getting upset that these kids had ruined my view,I began to reflect on some of the idiosyncracies of hippies. Hippies are amazing, because whereas I might like to keep a 3 foot personal space buffer around me at all time, they like to keep maybe a 6 inch buffer between them and any person near them. So when I say these dudes floated in to stand in front of me, I mean like they were standing practically on the tips of my shoes. Another great thing about hippies is that they're all white. I have never seen a hippie who was anything other than a skinny white dude or chick. And no matter how dirty and nappy and smelly hippies my age are, for some reason I can always picture them wearing a suit and tie in 10 years. It's like they're little kids playing dress up, but they get dressed up in dirt and essential oils and bong resin instead of nice clothes. I know it's weird, but that's just the impression that I get.

Ok, ok I'm coming to the real point of this story. To me, the most amazing thing about hippies is that no matter what's going on around them-whether music is playing, or they're hearing a public address, or they're riding in a car-hippies can always find a way to dance. They always find a reason to dance. And the great thing about the hippie dance is that you can call it THE hippie dance and everyone knows exactly what kind of dance you're talking about. Go through it with me here:

First**: shift your weight over to your right foot.

Second: bend your right knee and stoop down a little bit. Rotate your shoulders back almost like you're dodging a ball that someone is throwing over your left shoulder. All weight should be shifted to the right foot, and your left foot should be a little off the ground.

Third: Now put both feet down, stand up straight, shift your weight to your left foot.

Fourth: bend your left knee, and stoop down a little bit. Do the whole shoulder rotate thing, but pretend that the ball is coming at your right shoulder. Now all weight should be on your left foot, and your right foot should be a little off the ground.

Fifth: Keep repeating these steps over and over in a slow, somewhat halting movement, like you're thinking about every single movement that your body is making.

Congratulations, you have earned "Hippie Dance" Skills! And the answer to your next question is yes, I have spent the past 10 minutes doing the hippie dance over and over just so I could explain it to you. You better be trying it yourself, just to make my efforts worthwhile. But seriously, wherever there are hippies, you see the same dang dance without fail!! These dudes, hippie-ed out as they were, couldn't even get the hippie dance consistently right. They would do it fine for a few seconds, then pause, sort of giggle and poke each other, shake their dreads, and mess up the dance. Then the one hippie dude would hop very gingerly from one foot to the other in a crouched stance, almost as if he was Gulliver trying to hop over a Liliputian NASCAR race. It was the lamest, most awkwardly carried out dance I've ever seen. Granted these dudes had the dancing ability deck stacked against them from the start (White + Hippie + High + Trying to Dance to Jazz), but I think they made Jerry Garcia roll in his grave.

The dancing was awful, and it really took away from my experience with the Jeff Coffin Mu'tet. Fortunately, one of the hallmarks of the hippie subculture is gross personal apathy. After about 10 minutes of awkwardly dancing "the hippie dance", they gave up and went to drink beer. Anyway, the whole scene was at once incredibly weird and in the selfsame moment completely predictable. I live in a hippie town now, so I shouldn't be surprised. But for you kids out there who don't get to see and smell rich hippie white kids too often, next time you see them starting to do their little dance routine do them a favor:

1) make sure you instruct them on how to properly hippie dance and
2) make sure you direct them to the nearest bar so then that apathy does sit in, they'll be out of your way for the rest of the night.




* I'm trying to say 'disadvantaged' instead of 'retarded' in an effort to be more sensitive...pff.

** This is the hippie dance for a DUDE! For a chick, all you have to do is sway from side to side and put your hands in the air. The hippie dance for dudes is really a lot harder, though both can easily be accomplished by your average kindergartner.