Flamenco dancing is hard core

I've set a 20 minute timer again to get myself in proper writing mode. I thought I would write about flamenco dancing because I just found a Barnes N Noble receipt on my desk where I had scribbled details about a flamenco performance I'd gone to in April. I was so inspired by it, I had to write something so I'd dug around my purse, found this rather long receipt and wrote what I could. Here's what I wrote:

Allegreas-the dance of joy. The singer said that her parents were flamenco performers. Her mother was a dancer and her father played guitar. Singing for her was like learning to walk, it was part of her growth as a groovy human being. The performance is improvised. The dancer's hands, that little woman on the flat wooden board, are graceful while her strong feet strike the floor. Her shoes are the precussion. The guitarist follows the pace of her feet, whether they sink to the floor slow and steady or click at a blinding speed. (click at a blinding speed? do I really get paid to write?) She kicks, her skirt flares, and she takes it in at the knee, using the skirt to tease and to give her hands a prop while they do a kind of dance of their own. These feet, hands, legs and hips all know their individual moves, and they compliment each other, whereas I think if I tried the same style I would tangle up in a knot.

That's all I could fit on the front and back of that receipt. It's a scroll of barely legible, tiny pen scratch, and as a rough rough draft it's not very good, but it reminded me of how I've been wanting to write about it.

Part of what I love about the music and the dancing of this art form is that it is so intense. At times fatally so. There was a famous flamenco dancer, Carmen Amaya, who died of kidney failure in the 1960's because the stomping of her dancing had pulverized her kidneys. This chick danced herself to death. THAT is rock n' roll. She didn't OD on heroin or sleeping pills, she didn't down a bottle of whiskey and choke on her own vomit, or get shot by her pimp, no - she danced so hard that she rocked her insides to pieces. She OD'd on dancing and guitar. Fuckin' right.

The timer has gone off. I must now be off to learn how to rock with the Spaniards, not to the death you understand. Perhaps to some respectable toe blisters.