Macarena 2.0

On the morning of my fiftieth birthday, I woke up believing I was about to change the world.

Not the whole world.

I am not insane.

Just the world of group dancing.

Which, depending on the wedding, cruise ship, bar mitzvah, office holiday party, or minor league baseball seventh-inning stretch, is still a considerable portion of the world.

I sat at my kitchen table in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, drinking coffee from a mug my daughter had bought me that said "WORLD'S OKAYEST DAD," and reviewing the final notes for Macarena 2.0.

Rachel gave me the mug when she was fourteen.

"Because World's Best Dad felt legally complicated," she said.

I laughed then because she laughed.

That is one of the great tricks of being a father. Sometimes you laugh because the thing is funny. Sometimes you laugh because your child is funny. Sometimes you laugh because you are grateful they are still trying to make you laugh.

The original Macarena was simple.

Too simple, really.

Arms out. Palms down. Palms up. Touch shoulders. Touch head. Touch hips. Turn.

A masterpiece, yes, but an incomplete one.

The wheel was also a masterpiece until someone invented the tire.

For almost thirty years, I had been working on the tire.

My brother Tom called Macarena 2.0 "the Electric Slide for people with unresolved trauma."

Rachel called it "your little dance thing," which somehow hurt more.

My ex-wife called it "one of the reasons."

She never said one of the reasons for what.

She didn't have to.

By noon, I had loaded everything into my car.

Three poster boards.

A projector.

A folding easel.

Two boxes of instructional pamphlets.

And the binder.

The binder was four inches thick and contained notes dating back to 1997, though the real beginning was Barcelona.

1996

I was twenty years old.

A dorky kid from New Jersey studying abroad, though "studying" feels generous. Mostly, I wandered around pretending I understood architecture and ordering ham sandwiches with the trembling confidence of a man defusing a bomb.

Then I met Ingrid.

She was Norwegian.

Beautiful in a way that made me angry at geography. Like, what were they doing over there? What was in the water?

Ingrid was worldly.

That was the word I used then because I didn't have better words.

She smoked sometimes, but not like American college kids smoked. They smoked like they were trying to look cool. Ingrid smoked like the cigarette had applied for the privilege.

She spoke four languages.

I could barely ask where the bathroom was in one.

One night, after practicing Spanish at the hostel with an even dorkier dude from Regina, Canada, I told a joke. The only person who laughed sincerely was Ingrid.

For two weeks, every night, we danced.

The Macarena was everywhere that summer.

Bars.

Clubs.

Restaurants.

Beaches.

You could not escape it, and nobody wanted to.

The whole world seemed to know the same moves at the same time.

I had never felt anything like it.

I had never felt like I belonged anywhere so quickly.

That is the part people never understood.

They thought I was chasing Ingrid.

Maybe I was for a while.

But Ingrid became blurry over time.

I forgot her last name.

I forgot whether her eyes were blue or green.

I forgot what she studied.

But I never forgot the feeling of standing beside her on a packed dance floor while everyone moved together and, for once in my life, I didn't feel like I was watching life happen to other people.

I was in it.

I was fully, stupidly, gloriously in it.

So yes, maybe Macarena 2.0 sounded ridiculous.

But it never felt ridiculous to me.

It felt like unfinished business.

My fiftieth birthday party started at six.

Officially, it was a birthday party.

Unofficially, it was the unveiling.

People arrived smiling and carrying bottles of wine, as if this were a normal party for a normal man.

Rachel came first.

She saw the projector and closed her eyes.

"Dad."

"What?"

"No."

"You don't even know what I'm doing."

"I saw the easel."

Tom arrived ten minutes later, looked at the banner I had hung across the back wall, and said, "WELCOME TO THE FUTURE OF DANCE feels like something police find in a storage unit."

I ignored him.

Visionaries have to.

By seven-thirty, everyone had eaten.

People were laughing.

Talking.

Having what they believed was the party.

This was charming.

Wrong, but charming.

I tapped a spoon against my glass.

The room quieted.

Rachel looked at the ceiling.

Tom whispered, "And here comes the weather."

I smiled.

"Thank you all for being here tonight."

People clapped.

"I know most of you think this is a fiftieth birthday party."

Small laughter.

"But those of you who know me best know I have been working toward something for many years."

More silence than I had hoped.

"Tonight, I am proud to introduce Macarena 2.0."

The projector came on.

My first slide was a timeline.

Barcelona. 1996.

I talked for forty-five minutes.

That may sound long.

It was not long.

Not for the amount of material.

I had charts showing the rise and fall of group dances.

I had a section on the Cha Cha Slide.

I had a section on TikTok, which I pronounced correctly despite what Rachel later claimed.

I had a pie chart.

The pie chart was maybe a mistake.

Then came the demonstration.

I stood in the center of the room and pressed play.

The music began.

Not the Macarena.

Something adjacent.

Something with legal breathing room.

I raised my arms.

"Phase one is invitation."

Nobody moved.

"Phase one," I repeated, "is invitation."

Rachel stepped forward first because she is my daughter and because children are put on earth to rescue us from ourselves before eventually needing to be rescued from us.

Then Tom.

Then a few friends.

Then coworkers.

Soon, the dance floor was full.

I began.

Arms out.

Palms down.

Palms up.

Cross.

Uncross.

Shoulder.

Heart.

Sky.

Turn.

Recover.

Point.

Clap.

Sweep.

The room collapsed almost immediately.

People were facing different directions.

My neighbor Linda nearly punched a waiter.

Tom started doing some kind of crab-walk that wasn't part of the choreography and, frankly, felt personal.

Jim, an old coworker, was imitating a sheep being corralled by a sheepdog.

I stopped the music.

"Again," I said.

We tried again.

It got worse.

Not slightly worse.

Worse in the way second marriages can be worse because everyone is older and should know better.

I looked around the room.

People were smiling.

Trying.

Failing.

And then, finally, after thirty years, I saw it.

Not as a concept.

Not as criticism.

As truth.

The dance was bad.

Not misunderstood.

Not ahead of its time.

Bad.

Too many movements.

Too much need.

Too much me trying to force a room full of people to feel something I had felt once when I was twenty years old and beautiful, only because someone beautiful had looked at me that way.

The music ended.

Everyone clapped politely.

That was the worst part.

If they had booed, I could have hated them.

If they had laughed, I could have defended myself.

But they clapped like they loved me and wished I would stop.

I stood there under the banner.

Fifty years old.

Sweating through my shirt.

The future of dance dead on arrival.

And I said, to no one in particular, "I think I wasted a lot of time."

The room went quiet.

Rachel walked toward me.

For a second, I thought she was going to hug me.

Instead, she laughed.

Not meanly.

Softly.

"Oh, Dad," she said. "Of course you wasted some time. You spent thirty years trying to make a sequel to the Macarena."

People laughed.

I laughed too.

A little.

Then she took my hand.

"But that isn't all you did."

Tom disappeared into the hallway and came back with a cardboard box.

"What is this?" I asked.

Rachel opened the first box.

Pictures.

Cards.

Programs.

Old notes.

A life, apparently.

Mine.

There was a photograph of me teaching Rachel to ride a bike.

A card from Tom after his surgery.

A picture from a Little League banquet.

A note from a coworker whose wife had died.

A Father's Day card Rachel made in second grade, where she drew me with enormous ears and wrote, "My dad is good at pancakes and being loud."

People started telling stories.

Not Barcelona stories.

Not Ingrid stories.

Me stories.

Ordinary stories.

The kind I had not preserved in binders.

The time I drove through a snowstorm to help Tom move.

The time I stayed late with a coworker after his diagnosis.

The time I brought soup to Linda after her hip replacement.

The time Rachel and I got lost coming home from the aquarium and ended up eating waffles for dinner at ten o'clock at night.

I remembered all of them once they said them.

That was the terrible part.

They had been there.

All of them.

I had been there too.

But some part of me had kept looking over their shoulders toward a nightclub in Barcelona that probably wasn't even open anymore.

Rachel picked up one of my notebooks.

"Dad, I think something wonderful happened to you in Spain."

I nodded.

"And I think you've spent thirty years trying to get back there."

I nodded again.

"But I don't think it was her."

I tried to picture Ingrid's face.

For the first time, I couldn't.

Not clearly.

Rachel looked around the room.

"I think you felt like life had opened a door and let you in."

My throat tightened.

"And all these people have been trying to let you in for years."

That was when I cried.

Not beautifully.

I am not one of those single-tear men.

I cried like an appliance breaking.

Rachel hugged me.

Tom hugged both of us because he has never respected personal space during emotional moments.

Then someone in the back, I think Linda, said, "Play something we can actually dance to."

Everyone laughed.

The music changed.

Not the Macarena.

Not Macarena 2.0.

Just a song.

A normal song.

"I Want to Dance With Somebody" by Whitney Houston.

People started dancing.

Badly.

Joyfully.

Without instructions.

Without history.

Without me teaching them where to put their hands.

I stood there for a moment, surrounded by people who had loved me through every ridiculous version of myself.

Including this one.

Especially this one.

Tom handed me a beer.

"So," he said.

"So."

"You ready to admit the dance stinks?"

I looked at the projector.

At the diagram still glowing on the wall.

At the arrows and phases and aspirational conclusion.

"It needs work," I said.

He smiled.

"There he is."

Later, after midnight, I packed the notebooks into a box.

I did not throw them away.

That would have been too easy.

Too cruel.

Those notebooks had carried me somehow.

Wrong direction maybe, but they carried me.

I closed the lid and slid the box beneath a table.

Then I went back to the dance floor.

Rachel was laughing.

Tom was embarrassing himself.

Linda was doing something with her hips that suggested the replacement had been a complete success.

And for the first time in almost thirty years, I was not trying to recreate the greatest night of my life. I was in it.

Fifty years old.

Loved.

Ridiculous.

But there.