Moments of Lucidity

                        Moments of Lucidity

     I have Chicken Dance Elbow.

     My daughter told me not to talk about it, but I feel that full disclosure is the right thing to do.

She was been staying with at the time and she already had hung a few of those sentiment signs around the house. You know the ones: “No matter where I serve my guests, they always like my kitchen best,” and “Live, laugh, love.” Like that.

     Hers say “Remember, as far as the rest of the world knows, we’re a normal family,” and,  “What happens in the house stays in the house.”

     But I told her that if I kept this to myself you would all lose faith in me. She just rolled her eyes.

     It happened one night when I was surfing the web. You know how that goes – you start out Googling for a sour cream enchilada recipe and up pop dozens of possibilities from the definition of sour grapes to the location of the nearest store that sells crème de cacao. And when you click on that one you get all kinds of interesting liquors you never tried before but want to experiment with right then. So you drive to a liquor store and come home with a box full of pretty bottles holding liquids in jewel colors that just beg to be sipped. And the next thing you know, you’re doing the chicken dance.

     That is not what happened to me.

     No, really.

     I happened across the clip quite innocently as I was looking at movie trailers on my computer. The catchy music started, and some cartoon chickens began the dance. Now, nobody doesn’t do the chicken dance when the music plays. You can’t help yourself. It’s like trying not to dance when Brave Combo is playing. You can’t not dance when Brave Combo is playing anything. And if it’s the chicken dance, well…

     Of course you know the steps. Everyone knows the steps because there actually are no steps. It’s all in the arms and the hips. Da ta da ta da ta da…. Put your hands in the air in front of you and form beaks with your thumbs and fingers. Open and close your beaks four times. Da ta da ta da ta da…. Hook your fingers under your armpits and flap your wings four times. Da ta da ta da ta da…. Bend your knees and wiggle your tail feathers four times. And finish with a clap, clap, clap, clap. Then you dance around in a circle until you get dizzy and then you start over. It was the wing flapping that got me.

     I was sitting at my desk in my home office at the time and the chair has wooden arms. So when I flapped, I cracked my left elbow on the left arm of the chair. Sounded kind of like da ta da ta da ta da…. “# **&!”

     Christi came running in from the living room to see what all the “#**&”ing was about. I explained amid moans and curses and rubbing my elbow.

     “You cracked your elbow while doing the chicken dance while sitting in a desk chair,” she said.

     “Right.”

     “Nobody ever did anything that stupid,” she muttered under her breath as she stalked out of the room.

     “Remember the time you turned over in bed and a bed spring impaled itself in your butt?” I called out. “Remember you had to call 911 and half the fire department turned out to watch the extraction?”

     “That was different,” she said indignantly.

     “Of course it was. There was no music to go with the bed spring.”

     At one time I had a stuffed chicken that danced and played the song. I loved that stuffed chicken and played with it often at my office before I retired. It disappeared one night after I went home and I never saw it again. Soon, though, I had a four-foot-tall stuffed giraffe that someone lost beside the building (seriously? How do you lose a giraffe?) and it was quiet, so nobody took it away from me.

     Christi moved out after that. It had nothing to do with the chicken dance, I’m sure.

But, admit it. At some point while you were reading this column you flapped your wings. Yeah, you did.

     OK, maybe you didn’t. But you’re dying to do it now. So go ahead, I won’t tell. Da ta da ta da ta da….