Vogue

(*This is my nod-to-Madonna episode, coming after Glee.)

Most of my lessons in life, I got from songs while growing up. Whenever I was troubled I turned to the radio for solace.

Look around, everywhere you turn is heartache, it’s everywhere that you go. You try everything you can to escape the pain of life that you know.

Break-up songs, sad songs, angry songs, moving on songs, refusing to move on songs—whatever I felt, there were songs that fit the moment. Or I used a song as an antidote to break a particular moment, especially if the emotions were already too much for me to handle.

And I could find them all on the radio, flipping through stations. I started with American Top 40 with Casey Kasem on AM radio; I had a small transistor radio then. Then when AT40 moved to FM, I followed it there. My transistor radio was replaced with a bigger one. Then I moved on up to an AM/FM cassette recorder, a one-speaker model that was the precursor to the boom boxes.

I remember hours lost just letting my mind wander as the song enveloped me. Often I’d imagine me singing the song in a jam-packed concert—I think that’s what first fueled my desire to wear my heart out on my sleeve while performing before a huge number of people.

When all else fails and you long to be something better than you are today, I know a place where you can get away. It’s called a dance floor, and here's what it’s for.

I was already working in advertising when I discovered the joys of dance clubs. I started going with my gay and fag hag officemates to Zoo in Malate (which is actually a bar, but people would dance at the available spaces in between tables). Then we discovered Giraffe, where we mastered the Macarena while dancing on top of tables.

At that time, I was still very conscious of my dancing. Unless there was a specific choreography, I wasn’t sure of what to do with my hands and feet.

When Giraffe closed, the pink people moved back to Malate. Joy and Mint became the places to dance and get lucky. I was never one to get lucky; I was too conscious to dance, what more hook up? I didn’t really frequent those places. I’d be at Pepe & Pilar next door, watching with envy the cool guys who’d fearlessly walk up to the metal door of Joy and disappear inside.

Then I got tired and stopped going to the scene for a few years.

When I returned to Malate, the old haunts were gone. There was a new one, a very small, very cramped, but very jumping place—Bed.

So come on, vogue! Let your body move to the music, hey, hey, hey! Come on, vogue! Let your body go with the flow, you know you can do it.

Because Bed was so jam-packed, one couldn’t dance so I learned how to dance by bobbing one’s head and shaking one’s booty while standing in place. It started from there. Then I’d see these guys dancing so sexy, yet seemingly staying in one place. I started copying their moves. But after a while, I realized my body had a mind of its own. So I just let my moves evolve.

It makes no difference if you’re black or white, if you’re a boy or a girl. If the music’s pumping, it will give you new life. You’re a superstar! Yes, that’s what you are. You know it.

The first time someone approached me when he saw me dancing, I felt a rush like no other. It was a feeling of power. Ang haba ng hair ko!

But of course, that didn’t happen every night I danced in Bed. And the less it happened, the unhappier I got. Until one night while dancing near the ledge, I looked up at the dancing lights crisscrossing the giant mirror ball and had a “Eureka!” moment. I had made dancing a tool for hooking up. I had to find once more the joy of dancing. That night, with the ball spinning over my head, I decided I was just going to dance the night away. (Of course, I ended up going home alone that night.)

The bigger Bed got, the more I went there not really to hook-up (it rarely happens really, I’m no spring chicken) but to just dance and lose myself in the music. For several hours, I can be in a world of my own where everything’s great and happy and I’m fabulous and beautiful and rejection and loss are nowhere in sight.

Beauty’s where you find it, not just where you bump and grind it. Soul is in the musical—that’s where I feel so beautiful, magical, life’s a ball, so get up on the dance floor!

But after a while, things start to feel the same.

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P.S. – Below is Madonna’s live performance of “Vogue” in her Sticky & Sweet Tour. I particularly like the new choreography. For me this song is one of the highlights of her concert.