The saddest movement of all time

Lynda has a great long interview at the Eugene Weekly. I love this part of the interview:

Q: I loved it when you said on “Talk of the Nation” that “the only movement left for adults is exercise, which is the saddest movement of all time.” What do you think the world would be like if adults were a little more free with movement?

A: Well, I was lucky enough to start taking hula dancing classes when I was in the second grade and I kept it up twice a week through seventh grade. To me, folk dancing is probably the happiest movement of all time. I just lucked into a lot of it. When I got to high school I had a gym teacher who seemed about 300 years old to me, her name was Miss Frisbee. And she was way into Mesopotamian folk dancing. She had these freaky little leather shoes with curled toes and all of these little drums and bells, and the records she played had such a crazy sound to them. This was in 1974 at a mostly black high school in Seattle. Miss Frisbee's class wasn't popular, but it beat regular gym classes. It was an option, and I took it, and I'm so glad I did.

We also did Israeli folk dancing. I think these old folk dances have something very big in them. The kind of movement they contain is transformative and restorative. You know, when country line dancing was starting to be a big thing, I'd hear people put it down. Cool people hated country line dancing. But I was so excited by it. It meant that anyone in the room could get up there and move around to the Boot Scootin' Boogie. They could be all different shapes and sizes. Even that crazy chicken dance makes me happy. The Electric Slide makes me happy. Cool people are wrong about so many things.

{Photo snagged from Wendy Mc.}

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