THE UNIQUE CAROL-- Appraising the Extraordinary Talent of a Go-Go Dancer

What is it that we lose every day and must regain to go on living? It is those moments when we are at one with ourselves and the world,when no longer torn  by strife, doubts, dullness or half-starts, we sing, remember, celebrate, "be". It is for those moments we go to watch Carol dance. Like Chaplin or Bogart she takes us out of ourselves  by bringing us to ourselves. We  knew somewhere that  all along  we were smiling and moving to the ablutionary flow of music, that we were channeling our toils and troubles, for a few brief minutes, in the great purgative of music. Everything had music to it and we were awake and alive as we too seldom are. Now, before us, Carol revives that life by expressing us through expressing herself.
     Instead of corrupting the song she dances to as so many go-go dancers do by by not listening , by not reacting honestly, going only half-way with their feelings, Carol incarnates it. Watch her dance to her favorite song, "Born To Be Lovers;". The ecstatic far-away look in her eyes, the marvelous control of joy building in her body, the over-brimming smile of happiness, are the song gaining corporeal form.  Strain and release ,then, are nearly synonymous.  One is always about to become the other.
     It is this delicate tension which also gives her body its own silent ultrasonic (in the sense of being unheard) music, a music encased in its own rhythm and contingent ro the jukebox only in as much as the molecules of a sheet of steel are  mercy to the sun.
     Her body is like a network of tightly bound elastic nerved with consciousness, going with instead of against stimuli. Watching Carol we are reminded of the constant striving of opposites  to fuse harmoniously and never reaching, or rarely, oneness. Watching Carol we observe a dancer being unafraid to blend her own personality into the nuances of a song, to become an individualist of motion!
     Hence her style is unique, individual in the purest sense. It is continually being created out of her reactions to the world, her native intelligence, her sense of rhythm, and her sexuality--her honest adherence to and interpretation of these factors.
     Her eyes are a phenomenon in themselves. They do not evade you, nor can you evade them. They meet your being like truth, they possess you for brief seconds like arms, they dowse you with their blue sexual heat, then avert abruptly into a smile that goes reckless with relief and joy. And here we touch on her power. She brings you to an intense pitch of excitement (which is not always sexual--it just as frequently can be and is the aesthetic rush real beauty sometimes bestows)  and then relieves that excitement fully on stage  with no more than her facial expressions and body movements--a minimum of facial expressions, I might add.  For she prefers her inarticulate feelings and intuitions to rise and reach out at her audience with the undifferentiated yet inexorable force of a magnet poised over its captive object.  That in essence is Carol vis-a-vis her audience. That is the source of the suspended excitement we get from seeing her, of being near her, of simply knowing she is there.
     Hers is the All-American girl's face: blue eyed blond, featured on the covers of Glamour and Redbook, a face that is supposed to symbolize unblemished girlhood, dewy motherhood and some highly valued but completely vague eternal virtue. I doubt even in her most odd, capricious moments Carol ever pictured herself in this hypocritical way. Against this national, lifeless ideal image, Carol has asserted a truly virtuous, truly pure personality, thereby becoming exactly what the image idealizes, but in a totally new and different context: I am merely what I am, I shall be what I feel and perceive, I shall be pure to my own conscience, I shall be virtuous according to my own ways.

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This real life account of an actual go-go dancer of the late 70s and early 80s was included in the Coda of the novella, Crucibles of Passion, copyright(c) 2000 by Ronald Jones (aka candycrier)