DANCE! DANCE, I SAY!

I spent a long weekend in Vegas. And if you’ve never been to the city that never sleeps, let me be the first to tell you that four days feels like three weeks.

Two days into the vacation, you realize that you have no idea what time it is, what day it is, and worst of all, which hooker you were with last night.

Okay, the hooker thing is a bit on the fabricated side, but we did see a guy slumped over in the middle of Fremont Street with a needle still stuck in his arm and a woman seriously having a great time dancing like…well, imagine a person hyped up on cocaine grooving to her own beat with arms flailing, teeth clenched showing nothing but gums, and a wicked two step that’s supposed to be The Dougie.

I wonder if that woman fell victim to the Dancing Plague of 1518 and cursed us all.

You see, back in the early sixteenth century, a woman walked out of her home and started dancing uncontrollably in the streets of Strasbourg (now in France). History states that she danced in a convulsed frenzy until collapsing of exhaustion. She rested some, then jumped back into the jive as if music filled her senses, kind of like the woman on cocaine in Downtown Vegas.  

If that’s not weird enough, over a three-month span, from July to September, approximately four hundred people fell victim to the same dancing mania. The persons’ behavior was so bizarre that city authorities arranged for professional dancers and musicians to accompany the diseased in a dance-type hall to help those afflicted by the rage. Suddenly, all the dancing stopped and many died from exhaustion.

Call me crazy, but doesn’t this sound like a typical Vegas experience?

You start out fine and sober, then all of a sudden, you’re coerced by the live band playing on stage and your body starts swaying to the beat. A few drinks later, that sway turns into a body-bounce house. Now add a couple shots, and bam, you’re dancing in a frenzy with your friends and no one around you cares the slightest bit.

Why? Because they’re grooving too. Pretty soon, you and hundreds of your new found friends are partying in the streets and listening to live music under the light-spectacle dome, sloshing drinks on each other while doing the polka, and slurring words.

I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist or anything, but do you see the similarities between the Dancing Plague of 1518 and Fremont Street of 2021 or is it just me?

Think about it. You get home from the vacation exhausted like you’ve been infected by some crazed drinking/ dancing disease and have to spend the next week in recuperation, all while trying to get back into the normal routine of life. You don’t remember much of the trip—it’s the plague—and strange phone numbers keep popping up on your phone.

I don’t know if the correlations are justifiable, but I can’t rule out heavy suspicion.

Thank you, friends, for a well needed break from the norm. Until next time…