Megan Stielstra's Blog

I'm bringin' sexy back.

Them other boys they don't know how to act.

I think it's special what's behind your back.

So turn around and I'll pick up the slack.

“What the hell does this song mean?’” I said to Kat. We’d just arrived at Boom Boom Room, a house club at Green Dolphin that doesn’t even OPEN until midnight—MIDNIGHT. Usually I’m in bed by ten o’clock and there I was at MIDNIGHT, on a SCHOOL NIGHT, surrounded by sweaty, half-naked twenty-year-olds all shaking their butts and waving their arms and singing along with the music, a lyric of which reads as follows: “Let me see whatchyer twerkin’ with.”

“Did he say TWERKING?” I asked, holding tight to Kat’s hand so I wouldn’t lose her in the crowd. “Is that even a verb?” She didn’t hear me, or maybe she was ignoring me, whichever the case we made it to the bar and I ordered my Maker’s Mark, a necessary accessory, I felt, for getting through the night. And the week. And the end of semester, and the Holidays, and my husband and I just bought a condo, which is great, but now there’s a mortgage and property taxes and—

“You need a break,” Christopher told me as we walked to the car. “Call Kat, go dancing, just stop THINKING for a couple hours.”

It sounded like a good idea—I’d get all dolled up and have “girls night out,” like I did in my early twenties. But this—the Boom Boom Room, the JT, the Twerking—this wasn’t my early twenties. In my early twenties we were dancing to Groove is in the Heart. I drank Amaretto Stone Sours and wore platform boots and went home with strangers. The Boom Boom Room didn’t exist back then, and Justin Timberlake was in the Mickey Mouse Club, and Kat was still in high school and suddenly, in a great rush, I realized it—

I’m thirty.

One.

More than that, I’m THAT kind of thirty-one. The kind that just doesn’t GET it anymore. The kind I promised myself I would never, ever be.

It’s January 1984. I’m nine years old, my jeans are pegged so tightly at the ankles that I can’t feel my feet and a single ponytail, well ratted with Aquanet and a pick comb, juts out over my ear like a handle to my head. I have a pink plastic boom box, a cassette tape of Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual and I’m standing in front of the bathroom mirror, dancing side-to-side and singing She Bop into a whisk.

Sidebar: This was before my mother found out about Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center and the “Filthy Fifteen,” a list of songs with questionable content including Prince, AC/DC and She Bop because apparently it taught adolescent girls how to masturbate and I’m like, Tipper, let’s get real, okay? I did not learn how to masturbate from Cyndi Lauper. I learned how to masturbate from the girl who played Augustus Gloop’s mother in the Ann Arbor community players 1987 production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I was twelve, minding my own business, turning into a blueberry night after night while over at the University of Michigan Mrs. Gloop was getting liberated in some Womyn’s Studies class—that’s womyn with a Y thank you very much—and on closing night she gave all the girls in the cast a book called Sex For One. To help us get in touch with our inner Venus. Let me repeat: I WAS TWELVE. I didn’t want to get in touch with my inner Venus. I wanted to stand in front of the bathroom mirror and sing along with Cyndi:

“She bop—he bop—a—we bop, I bop—you bop—a—they bop, Be bop—be bop—a—lu—bop, I hope He will understand, She bop—

“She What?” my mother asked. She was in the next room, grading high school English papers.

“Bop,” I told her, squinting at my reflection JUST like Cyndi did in the Time After Time video. “She BOP.”

“She can’t bop,” my mother said. “Bop is not a verb.”

Grammar was an important thing in our family. While my friend Becky and I were welcome to ride our bikes to the bookstore, me and Becky most certainly could not.

“It is so a verb,” I said, irritated that my performance had been interrupted. I put down the whisk, hit stop on my boom box and stood in the doorway so she could see my indignation. “Bop is totally an action word.”

My mother looked at me over her glasses. “Try it out in a sentence—“ I was always having to try stuff out in sentences— “We bop, I bop, they bop,” she demonstrated, oblivious that she was reciting lyrics, “You bop, he bop—“

“See, that’s good grammar!” I said.

“It is NOT good grammar,” she said, and then I said—okay: you know how sometimes, when you’re telling a story, you exaggerate certain things for dramatic affect? I am NOT exaggerating this next part—I walked right up to my mother, looked her dead in the eye and said, “Cyndi LAUPER says it’s good grammar!”

I’d just watched that episode of the Cosby show where Vanessa wants to wear make-up and her mother says no. Vanessa’s all thirteen and snotty and she says, “Rebecca’s mother lets her wear make-up!” and Claire says, “I am not Rebecca’s mother! If you want to live by her rules go live in her house but under my roof you will do as I say!” I think I imagined a similar exchange between me and my own mo—between my own mother and I, but it didn’t happen. She wasn’t some sitcom character with scripted dialogue, she was a very real woman trying to juggle a marriage and a career and a kid and sometimes I made her crazy, and sometimes worried and sometimes, hopefully, proud, but the thing with Cyndi Lauper and the grammar? That just made her tired. I remember she took off her glasses and looked up at the ceiling as though the rules of parenting might be stenciled in the paint. “Someday,” she said. “When you grow up, you’ll understand.”

When you are nine, nothing is as infuriating as being told you can’t understand something until later. I flounced back into the bathroom, turned the pink boom box up as loud as it would go and faced my reflection—the ridiculous ponytail, an off-the-shoulder sweatshirt ala Flashdance. Never, I told myself. Never ever EVER are you going to grow up.

In my twenties, it was easy—there was the Marshall Fields Counter with its anti-wrinkle creams and under eye concealers. There was Wet Seal and Delia’s and Forever 21. There was no cigarette tax and four a.m. bars and all the frivolity that goes along with being young and free and careless and I’d say, “Grow UP? Who wants to grow up and have to be all responsible and, like, pay taxes? And give in to the patriarchal social conditioning? And its consequent enslavement of the masses? Not me, man, I’m gonna live my life the way I want, I’m gonna (air quotes) Make Art. And live on a farm where I grow my own corn. And on weekends come into the city for very high-cultured evenings at the theater. And travel a lot and be very high-cultured and aware of worldly events and—”

Now I’m like, “Will somebody shut that girl UP ALREADY???” I think, If ever I sound like that again will someone please shoot me in the kneecap?

Back at the Boom Boom Room, the music had just changed. The bartender was handing me my Maker’s as I heard it: You’re going to dance. You’re going to dance. You’re going to dance. And have some fun. The crowd went crazy then—you know, when you’re at some club and the DJ plays YOUR SONG and you have to jump up and down and be all, “Oh my God this is MY SONG!” and rush out onto the dance floor because this is YOUR SONG and the entire world must immediately recognize this fact? Groove is in the Heart is that song for EVERYBODY—and the dance floor flooded with all sort of people—in their twenties AND thirties and even this one woman, she must’ve been fifty at LEAST, wearing a black crop top and a neck full of gold, shaking her butt with this shirtless little Deisl boy who must’ve gotten in on a fake ID—sidebar, when I was nineteen, my fake was from a five foot tall Puerto Rican girl named Rosario and it worked EVERY TIME. I would walk into clubs, five ten in my platform boots, head straight to the center of the dance floor and dance and move and shake because I was young and uninhibited and living every goddamn second and that night, when Kat held her hand out to me and said, “C’mon, let’s dance,” I set my Makers down on the bar and followed her to the middle of the dance floor ‘cause now, even though I’m thirty-one and inhibited (at least moreso than I was ten years ago, thankfully), I’m STILL living every goddamn second. I’m just living it BETTER: I have a kick ass relationship, a beautiful home, I’m making work that I’m proud of, I’m excited to go to work everyday and I have a very good interest rate on my Rewards card.

‘Cause you know, in order to bring the sexyback, a girl needs some really good shoes.