Skip to main content

THE NIGHT CLUB



In the late 1970s, an unusual figure became a central fixture in Manhattan’s premier night club, Studio 54 – normally frequented by celebrities, models, the young and the powerful. Sally Lippman was a retired attorney who had been elected to the New York State Bar in the 1920s and had recently lost her husband. Unwilling to spend her last years in silent loneliness, she bought some tight trousers, high-top sneakers and black leather boots and went out four nights a week, in the process making a number of new friends and earning herself the nickname Disco Sally. Nightclubs do not have a high reputation as therapeutic places. We associate them with grandstanding, a pressure to impress and a narrow group of initiates who intimidate the unfashionable and the ordinary. Most of us are held back from ever attending by a terror that we might be wearing the wrong clothes, that we might be too old or ugly and that we won’t know how to dance – as we put it – ‘properly’.  Disco Sally was wise enough not to let any such concerns inhibit her. She had lived long enough, suffered deeply enough and was close enough to death to know otherwise. She didn’t want to spend her last years in silence in her apartment and so dared to enquire about nearby clubs. Every culture in history, except for our own, has appreciated the need for all sections of society to gather regularly in order to lose themselves to a rhythmic beat. It’s been appreciated that, however rational we might manage to be the majority of the time, if we are to stay truly sane, we need to be given the chance to go mad at well-defined intervals. However reasonable we may normally try to be, in the right sort of night club, we can take a break from logic and dignity and flail our arms and legs with gleeful demented abandon – perhaps, if we are lucky, with some characters in thongs and cartridge belts too. We should be sensible enough to let folly have its reign. We generally work so hard to ward off any suggestions that we might be daft, but we should accept that the effort was always likely to be in vain and contrary to the facts. We are, each one of us, thankfully, entirely idiotic and it is a night club that gives us the licence to give visible expression to the madness we have repressed for too long and at too great a cost. We become properly serious when we can acknowledge a role for silliness. We mess around not because we think life is a joke, but precisely because we really know it isn’t. As we dance, we break down the normal barriers between ourselves and others. Whatever separates us in terms of age or background can be overcome. We are all similarly ailing, frightened, vulnerable creatures who long for love and acceptance and are terrified of being excluded and judged. To the sounds of Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor, we can bathe in an atmosphere of compassion and kindness. We don’t need to go to an asylum to explore the split-off parts of our broken minds; we need only – with a gleeful swing of our hips and arms – expunge our agonies on the dancefloor.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AGAINST SKIING HOLIDAYS

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a normal person in search of a holiday will enjoy skiing; they will delight in bracing mountain air, thrill at going down mogul dotted slopes and feel pleasantly exhausted after a day of parallel turns. This assumption about pleasure joins a host of others proposed by the modern world. Normal people will equally enjoy white wine, the Amalfi coast, the novels of Margaret Atwood, dogs, high heels, small children, Miami beach, oral sex, Banksy, marriage, Netflix and vegetarianism. We may legitimately delight in all of these elements; the issue lies in the immense pressure we are under to do so. The truth about ourselves may, in reality, be a great deal more mysterious than the official narrative allows. Whatever our commitments to decorum and good order, we may in our depths be far more distinctive than we’re supposed to be. We may — once we become sensitive to our faint tremors of authentic delight and boredom — hate the idea of jogging, the the...
Post a Comment
Dive In »

CLASSICISM

At present, our culture is dominated by a Romantic outlook; its predecessor, and in many ways its more deserving alternative, is a Classical view of life. Classicism is founded upon an intense, pessimistic awareness of the frailties of human nature and on a suspicion of unexamined instinct. The Classical attitude knows that our emotions can frequently over-power our better insights, that we repeatedly misunderstand ourselves and others, and that we are never far from folly, harm and error. In response, Classicism seeks via culture to correct the failings of our minds. Classicism is wary of our instinctive longing for perfection. In love, it counsels a gracious acceptance of the ‘madness’ inside each partner. It knows that ecstasy cannot last, and that the basis of all good relationships must be tolerance and mutual sympathy. Classicism has a high regard for domestic life; it sees apparently minor practical details as deeply worthy of care and effort; it doesn’t think it would be degrad...
Post a Comment
Dive In »

IMPOSTER SYNDROME

 PHILOSOPHY  In many challenges, both personal and professional, we are held back by the crippling thought that people like us could not possibly triumph given what we know of ourselves: how reliably stupid, anxious, gauche, crude, vulgar and dull we really are. We leave the possibility of success to others, because we don’t seem to ourselves to be anything like the sort of people we see lauded around us. The root cause of impostor syndrome is a hugely unhelpful picture of what other people are really like. We feel like impostors not because we are uniquely flawed, but because we fail to imagine how deeply flawed everyone else is beneath a more or less polished surface. The impostor syndrome has its roots in a basic feature of the human condition. We know ourselves from the inside, but others only from the outside. We are aware of all our anxieties, doubts and idiocies from within. Yet all we know of others is what they happen to do and tell us – a far narrower and more edited...
Post a Comment
Dive In »