One of My Favorite Stories. Ever.

Back in the day, my friend Marcia was quite the little radical. Which, of course, was part of the reason I loved her. For a time she fell in with some straight up, card carrying Reds and decided I needed to go to one of their meetings. (Yes, there it is...I attended a meeting. Put me on the blacklist).

We gathered one sunny afternoon in this funky, huge old house on Capitol Hill and everyone seemed really friendly. I'd read a little Marx in college; you know, just enough to be dangerous, and of course, I'd seen plenty of Woody Allen movies. (What that actually had to do with anything I can't quite say but it made me feel equal to the situation).

So the meeting starts and we're talking about lord knows what and I raised some objection to a statement and I am frakking smacked down by this older, beareded Marxist dude. I mean, smacked down. Screw dissent. He reamed me for taking exception to some point of Marxist doctrine and while he didn't succeed in making me cry, it sure as hell made me think that if being that rude was part of the revolution, I was out.

I was seriously earnest back in the day. I wanted big change. Reagan was the President, for crying out loud. The Russians were going to nuke us at any frakking moment. It was a pretty intense time and I so earnestly and perkily wanted to make a difference. But if there was one thing about "revolution" that resonated with me it was the classic Emma Goldman line: "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution". This largish group of vegetarian, Birkennstock wearing commies might really believe in revolution and social change but they were seriously no fun to hang with. And that was the end of my commie experience.

Except.

A couple months later Marcia asked me to go with her to a party. It was a Halloween get-together with all the commies. All I could think was "Why?" These were some of the most humorless people I'd ever met. Partying with them seems like an oxymoron. But Marcia pleaded. Plus, I think, I made this really killer mushroom paté and, of course, the party was a potluck and Marcia wasn't much of a cook. So I went, with the proviso that she was not to leave me alone with any commie boys and that if I needed to split we would go immediately.

We go. We eat. We drink. We make small talk. I am fundamentally confirmed in my view that whatever I am, "commie" isn't it. And then. Someone puts on a record. And people start dancing. And they dance like crazy fools, with complete abandon and joie de vie and all sorts of other spirits that I had not seen manifest in these people. And they kept dancing until the album was over. And do you have any idea what that record was? Because I did not believe it myself, not then and frankly, not even so much now. Yes, my friends. It was "Thriller". It was still too late for them to make me a commie but dang it, that was one fun night.