Mating Dance

Abstract

After ten years of marriage and a good while since dallying in the nightclub scene, my husband and I, quite by accident and with no intentions, stopped at the newest Omaha hot spot. I suppose we wanted to see what we had been missing. Stir was advertised widely as a dance club/nightclub/singles bar, in the vein of the famous Studio 54. Since I was old enough to actually remember the seventies, I felt quite at home. As we entered, the club was dimly lit with a long bar across the front where the dance floor ran, complete with choreographed bartender who never spilled a drop of alcohol as he threw a fifth of rum over his shoulder, behind his back, and up again to the deafening beat of seventies disco music. We found a table across the room and away from the crowd. Beside our table and leopard-print chairs was a round platform, three feet high and about as wide, inside which a neon light pulsated to the beat of Donna Summer's “Hot Stuff.” The dance floor quickly filled with gyrating twenty-to-thirty-somethings. The crowd was 70% female: young women with ultra-mini skirts and bare midriffs, rubbing and caressing each other as they moved in sync with the music. I explained to my husband this was the trend; young women dance, fondle and sometimes are publicly affectionate with other women, even though they eventually pair off with men. Maybe it was simply a test, I speculated, dipping a toe into the waters of sexual experimentation.