If you’d like, leave a favorite pleasant experience or memory in the comments so we can all enjoy you even more!

Mike provided had two critical things going for him.  First, he had a car.  And second, my Dad didn’t quite like him.

He was tall, too skinny, too pale, and he wore too much black. Our main activity together was laying on my bed with our legs dangling off the end, staring at the ceiling fan turning, our hands interlocked, discussing nihilism.

We sighed a lot, too.

The first time my dad met him, he asked, “What was THAT?”

One day, during a mediocre kissing session, Mike invited me to go see James Brown with him at Reunion Arena, the open air stadium where the Dallas Cowboys used to play.  His mom had won tickets from the local oldies radio station.  At the time, James Brown was 58 years old. It had been 26 years since I Feel Good hit.

When we arrived, the stadium was set up to seat half-capacity for the Godfather of Soul.

And the Godfather of Soul was four hours late. Kool and the Gang opened, unfortunately, for that entire four-hour duration, turning the party pop song Celebration into something it was never meant to be.

But then he arrived.

James Brown arrived in a limo, driven onto a square of too-green plastic grass in front of the stage. Amidst a back drop of go-go-esque dancers and a 12-piece band, James Brown burst forth from the limo, dressed in twinkling spandex and wearing sunglasses. When his feet hit the plastic grass, he looked surprised — like he had just been born. He caught his balance. He came alive.  He looked at the crowd and flashed his teeth at us in a smile. And he started to dance.

James Brown’s dance is one of great intensity, as if the point of his dance is exorcism through movement. He flailed his arms. His feet were spinning. He danced down the field. He danced up to the stage and the mic. And he started singing.

The crowd burst into screams and dancing and clapping. I’d never seen an audience so enthusiastic and utterly helpless for a performer. The closest thing I’d ever seen was on Beatles concert reels. But the Beatles inspired teenagers to faint and wet their paints. These were adults — many older than my parents! — giving themselves over to Brown’s ecstatic, insistent music and presence.

By the time he got to the song Please, Please, Please (one of his first hits and perhaps one of the rawest songs in English), we were completely, utterly his. We would do anything for him, feel anything for him, be anything for him. Maybe it was because I had never heard this song before, or maybe because I’d never been under the spell of such a performer, but his desperate, rhythmic love-begging captured me. He conjured up every feeling of longing, every sensation of wanton desire my adolescent heart had ever felt. He condensed every feeling of desperation I could imagine that the most passionate person on the planet had ever felt, and he amplified it to heart-wrenching proportions. I thought my heart would burst right there, in row L, under the arena lights and the wide open sky.

But somehow, I survived. Sweaty and exhausted and taken, I survived.

After three hours (no breaks) of solid dancing, singing, sweating, moaning, begging, and conducting, the limo arrived again. James Brown climbed back.  Who knows what happened when he closed the door behind him? The audience was transmogrified back into our bodies, here on planet earth. We sank into our seats, catching our breath.

Mike and I didn’t move for a long time. Our body temperatures cooled.  The crowd dispersed. The stage crew began rolling up cords, packing up mike stands and amplifiers. They turned off the main overhead lights, and the twinkling stars above us came out.

Mike was never a mediocre kisser again.

My name is Katie Raver.

I love living in Austin, Texas, learning and writing about communities and microcommunities, and many other exciting topics, such as having fun, Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), personal flexibility, organizing Meetups, and personal development!

If you’re interested in any of those, let’s connect and explore together!

Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/katie.raver

Meetup
http://www.meetup.com/members/7315277/

Kiva
http://www.kiva.org/team/nlp_number_one

NLP Resources Austin
http://www.nlpresourcesaustin.com/

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