Charlie Fox, who pens an imagined diary entry by Mia Wallace, Uma Thurman’s character in Pulp Fiction, about dancing the twist with Vincent Vega. It all comes together to form a weird, wonderful, and very wild whole. There’s a more meaningful side to the dance floor explored within the book’s pages too. Not only does it document the intersection between clubbing and counterculture—images of Keith Haring at Danceteria, revelers throwing shapes to Larry Levan at Paradise Garage, Michael Alig’s club kids, VHS screengrabs from the days of Northern Soul and acid house in Britain—but it also touches, however implicitly, on the powerful significance of the dance floor for marginalized groups of all stripes. “I think the dance floor is a space with this kind of transformational potential,” Healy says. “There’s a sense of freedom and liberation, and it’s a space apart from real life. When you start using movies as a starting point, these are the kinds of stories that filmmakers are telling. The stories of marginalized communities and what they found on the dance floor is something that just comes up, basically—that sense of freedom and self-discovery.”As Healy points out, there’s really no way to make a book about the dance floor without it sprawling across time, space, and communities. “I wanted there to be a certain playfulness in the book when it comes to ideas of the dance floor and a widening of what a dance floor might be,” she says. “I loved the idea of having something more unexpected like the Edith Wharton extract, because of course, the dance floor is actually a very coded, restricted space historically—Edith Wharton’s ballroom wasn’t a dance floor in terms of the sense of freedom we were just talking about. But at the same time, in terms of the acts of glancing and looking and judging that happen across the ballroom, or dance floor, in that scene, that still happens today. I think these older texts and older images have a continued relevance that can be surprising, or silly, or serious—or all of those things, hopefully.”Of course, all this also raises the question: At what point do you stop digging? There are so many rabbit holes you could travel down, so many cultures you could explore, so many scenes and moments from across the history of film and literature…. When did the book feel, well, finished? Even Healy admits she doesn’t have the answer. “I’d be watching a film and be like, Oh yeah, I completely forgot about this dance floor scene which feels quite pivotal, and we should probably include in the book. I basically spent my entire year of film-watching looking out for dance floor scenes,” she adds and then laughs. Yet she also acknowledges that it “took a village” to put a book of this scale and ambition together. (Archival consultants on the book included Fox, Amy Sall of SUNU magazine, and Miss Rosen, while the images and ephemera included within its pages were sourced everywhere from London’s Museum of Youth Culture to the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut.)Finally, the book’s afterword comes courtesy of New York magazine party columnist Brock Colyar, who charts their journey as a 20-something clumsily navigating the city’s clubs. (We can’t all be Bianca Jagger riding into Studio 54 on a white horse, after all.) “Enjoying yourself is dependent on quieting that self-conscious voice in your head that keeps insisting you look absolutely ridiculous and everyone’s watching you and oh my god you’re doing it wrong,” they write. “If you only pay attention to that voice, you never actually learn what makes the dance floor worthwhile, which is: letting go.” Their message speaks to the timelessness and vast scope of On the Dance Floor, yes, but also why we return to dance floors again and again: for the sheer and unbridled joy they induce. That’s something we can all relate to now that we’re able to put on our dancing shoes once again. “There’s a great quote from Lizzy Goodman about this, and even though she’s talking specifically about indie, rock culture, and punk culture, I think it applies to dance floors, generally,” Healy says. “She says that it allows for a permission slip to be yourself, and once you’re in that world? You discover who you are.”
As the Yes I have bpd big bussy disorder shirt moreover I will buy this founder of my very own tea line, I get glimpses into people’s daily tea rituals more than most. Yet I’m still always curious to know: What teaware do they use? Who do they like to drink tea with? Are they drinking tea for a big occasion, or just sipping a breakfast brew on a regular morning? I’m increasingly of the mind that instead of asking about celebrity’s skincare routines, we should be asking about their tea-time rituals. (We got a small glimpse of Kim Kardashian’s in Interview magazine recently, and it was fascinating.)
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