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Revolution on the Dance Floor

Y chromosomes commanded the dance floor in my eighth-grade dance class in 1974. The boys decided who got to dance (with them was the only option), and they led. We girls followed them in the foxtrot, waltz, and Lindy in the junior high gymnasium, awkward and exhilarated by turns. Some of us were half a head taller than some boys. Remember your face getting hot?

My girlfriends and I were newly estrogen-enhanced and boy crazy. Physical contact with the Y-carrying gods tended to scramble our brains. Even thinking about it did. More girls than boys meant we sat around waiting to be asked, which made me want to jump out of my skin. We couldn’t imagine a dance floor in which the power structure might be different, a world in which we with XX chromosomes could decide who got to dance, or lead.

I loved to dance anyway. I still love to dance.

Let me tell you about the Swing Club PDX in 2026. Anyone can ask anyone to dance. Any gender may lead; any gender may follow. You don’t even have to be a hard-and-fast gender. Leader and follower may switch repeatedly in a single song (my favorite thing to do). You may decline to dance and give no reason. You may dance solo. The options are revolutionary. 

Dancing is power. Leading, or having the choice to lead, is the very definition of power. In the Puritan era, dancing at all was punishable by torture—it was too joyful, and therefore powerful. Dancing—who we choose to dance with, and who leads—is political; it bridges the micro and macro worlds. Dancing with someone of your own gender may be liberating if you’re gay, and is hilariously fun even if you are not. Sharing the lead breaks the hierarchical paradigm on which authoritarianism depends. Being in person and sharing safe physical touch breaks the stay-at-home, screen-based social isolation that drives us further and further apart.

Today’s dance floor creates power-with instead of power-over. Those poor eighth-grade boys with Y chromosomes had never asked to command the dance floor, anyway. Coleading would have made them more free.

Like most revolutions, the one on the dance floor is still in process. In life, we each need to lead sometimes, and we each need to follow. Embracing both roles is perhaps the essence of democracy.

Would you like to dance?  

Alison Wiley, Portland

 

1968

“Born to be Wild” by Steppenwolf blared on the turntable as Fran and I laughed hysterically, sipping our cans of Tab and Fresca. It was the beginning of summer, 1968. We’d already survived sophomore year, the premier of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and Eugene McCarthy winning the Oregon primary. School was out, and we had three months of babysitting, lounging, and basically being screw-offs.

The winter had been brutal. Portland had been buried by a freak snowstorm, the state was looking to address a growing litter problem, and Governor Tom McCall was loved by most. Yet Martin Luther King had been assassinated in April, Vietnam and the Tet Offensive were dominating the news, and global unrest was agitating the markets. Getting up to flip the album to the B-side, Fran opened the door to her bedroom as her mother approached. 

“Girls. Robert Kennedy has been shot in LA.” 

Fran froze in her tracks. My involuntary jerk kicked over the Tab can, its dark, fizzy contents draining onto the carpet. Her mother had tears streaming down her face. Forget the music. The music died for me that day.

I went home shortly after; I lived only three houses away. I just wanted to be in my room. Three years earlier, my fifth-grade teacher had announced the slaying of President John Kennedy. I watched on live TV the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. During middle school, I read everything I could on the investigation and the filing of the Warren Report. Now this.

But being sixteen, life doesn’t stand still. I climbed Broken Top Mountain that summer. The Detroit Tigers won the World Series. I had a giant crush on the French alpine skier Jean-Claude Killy.  I bought the Beatles’ White Album the day it was released. And when McDonald’s introduced the Big Mac to the world, I ate my share.

Yet watching the Summer Olympics in Mexico City on television, as Tommie Smith and John Carlos won the men’s 200-meter and raised their fists in Black Power salutes, I instinctively knew the year 1968 would be one for the books. 

Wendy Kunkel, Tillamook

 

Fallen Leaves

With a sigh of impatience, I yell at my daughter to get in the car. We are going to be late to school. She rushes toward me, her rosy cheeks beaming, softening my own stern face. A bouquet of fallen maple leaves spills from her arms. Red, orange, yellow, fading green, and earthy brown. Her giddy delight at her creation of castaways lifts my spirits and gives me pause. Her youthful eyes see magic and possibility in the discarded—even in death she finds beauty.

Later, at the hospital, I admonish my short temper and remind myself to be present at work, not rush into the future. 

My first patient greets me with a nod and a smile. I am instantly charmed. Over the last few weeks his stamina has declined. His legs appear heavier with each step, gravity an overwhelming pull downward. His breath is running out. At the bedside, his worried daughter expresses concern over his seemingly precipitous decline; he had been doing well after the transition from peritoneal to hemodialysis. 

After his discouraging workup is complete, I feel empty-handed, with nothing to offer: no remedy, no hope. On the phone, his nephrologist sighs at the outcome he has both feared and anticipated. This man’s failing kidneys are dictating his fate. We should focus on comfort at this terminal juncture. Before hanging up, the nephrologist reflects, “He’s just the nicest guy, isn’t he?”

In my brief time with the patient, I have felt warmed by the kindness of his eyes, which shine with love for his daughter. I return to the bedside, share the grim report, and anticipate a grief-stricken reception. Yet the patient’s melancholy is not about the impending end of his own life but the impact of his mortality on his daughter. When I mention hospice, he surprises me by welcoming the support rather than showing resignation. He wistfully recounts how hospice had helped his wife pass in peace nearly a decade ago. 

His daughter reaches out to grab his hand, browned with age spots and wrinkled with wear. I see veins under the papery flesh and am reminded of the fallen maple leaves. His daughter gathers him close in an embrace, and there it is again: sweet beauty in life’s end.  

Becky Tuttle, Lake Oswego

 

Ten Years in the Forge

Ten years ago, we were ready to light the world on fire. 

We started with a dumpster. We abandoned our election viewing event in the Park Blocks, along with our hope, and we took to the streets. There was a moment, standing alone in downtown Portland, when I heard people yelling from the windows of their apartments, their voices echoing between buildings, joining the chorus of voices that had broken out to decry the world’s injustice. How could he have won? I did not know the world until that day. 

So many things fell apart—my education, my relationship, my sense of self-worth. What should I aspire to be in a world whose rules were written to reject me before I drew my first breath?

Ten years later, I have found some peace. Things are not better outside of me, but inside I have learned how to see beyond the blinding rage. I have adapted to the bitter taste of resentment. I no longer gasp in horror when the world plays out like it always has. I am no longer naive. 

The world was on fire then, and it is on fire now. We were creatures of the forest, believing that there was no fire because it did not touch us. It will burn until long after our bones join the ashes. Our role is to plant something that can grow in our place. Something that can drink from our water, once it is abundant and clean again. Something that will uncover our histories and languages, and reproduce itself with the lessons we failed to learn.

Ten years ago, I was afraid of being burned. Now, I breathe fire. 

Robin Fisher, Hillsboro

 

Another Language

The first revolution I knew happened in a doctor’s office.

No banners, no chants. Just my parents, a white coat, fluorescent lights, and me: a Korean American child trying to turn medical English into something my family could survive. I learned early that translation was not just about words. It was about power. A doctor could say “Just follow up,” and I had to understand the instruction, the insurance, the bus ride, and the fear beneath my mother’s face.

Like many children of immigrants, I became useful as a bridge. But everyone celebrates crossing bridges; fewer ask what it costs to hold the weight.

What I wanted then was not only an interpreter. I wanted someone to slow the room down, help my family ask the question underneath the question, and understand that our confusion was not failure but evidence of a system designed without us in mind.

Years later, I became a family physician. Not exactly a plot twist—more the Korean American child-of-immigrants cinematic universe staying on-brand. Medicine gave me better words, but it returned me to rooms where the pattern repeated: Professionals framed the questions, patients and communities carried the stories, institutions nodded, and power stayed where it had been.

In 2014, during residency, I cofounded a community organizing program in my community health center. I did not understand it then, but I think I was trying to build what was missing: not a better bridge, but people crossing together, turning around, and changing the road.

Over twelve years, the stories in our second-floor conference room changed: housing, language access, incarceration, diabetes, racial justice.

But the revolution was the same.

Someone told the truth about what the health system had missed. Someone else said, “That happened to me too.” A patient, organizer, or clinician connected one person’s pain to a larger pattern. Laughter broke through the heaviness, not as escape but as recognition: Oh. We are not alone.

The name came later: RELATE Lab. But the work was already there, in stories becoming relationships and in the belief that the people closest to the harm should help author what comes next.

Sometimes these stories, organized through relationships, helped move housing dollars, change translation policy, build reentry care, and shape diabetes programs led by patients
of color.

For years, I tried to translate my family into the language of institutions.

Now, I want institutions to learn another language.

Brian Park, Portland

 

Lacunae

I close my eyes and conjure a picture of my father’s robes, like angel wings, when he held up the host and the wine. The altar’s place was in the Lutheran churches in Minnesota, North Dakota. I walked with my father to protest the Vietnam War in a candlelit march to the Capitol. I forget the particular reason, the incursion, or the deaths.

The chairman of SNCC, who I loved, put his body up for beating, jail, marches, as we moved backwards and forwards, a march, a waltz, personal values versus movement values. He was a hero and a scalawag, posters hung in the subways to Free Him when he was already too free. I told him this to his face in pillow talk.

Jazz swirls into the net, the smoky clubs in the Village or on the Upper West Side where north of 96th Street was ours, claimed the revolutionary who invited me to smash monogamy with him.

North Dakota, childhood home, to Manhattan, and the girl from Queens asked me if North Dakota was more like Manhattan or Queens. I replied that North Dakota was like the runways at JFK Airport: flat and not very populated.

I fled upstate, and doulas attended my son’s birth in the Catskills, the ridgelines of the hills in succeeding rows, the interstices, almost, of life there, hills cut by rivers and creeks, names like Old Sodom Road, Brimstone Road, or landmarks named after longtime residents: Vroman’s Nose, the hill above the Schoharie Valley.

It was there I started my career, really, as the builder of an anti-poverty nonprofit, the job I would carry to Minnesota, where I built some buildings, and a staff, and new programs, and a life. It was so busy—two boys, one by birth and one adopted, as if a social experiment, a Black son and a White son. One was skinny and feisty; his brother, the golden child. I got to know systems: adoption, juvenile justice, mental health. I pushed against systems. It is what we did, we of agency, of the ’70s, of idealistic roots, of bureaucratic efficacy.

And then they left, the house empty, holes in the wallboard patched, and I saved for retirement, a job in health care administration, where I saw the same people I’d seen in my former job—not like past clients, but the very same people—and I loved those jobs, where we tried to integrate spirituality, alternative practices, a place for healing. Not recovery, but healing.

I need a place for healing now. Maybe we all do. I won’t discount the seasons of struggles, the seasons of joy, but now is a time for healing, looking back with certainty and forward into unknowns.

I retired to Oregon, and my two granddaughters—yes, two girls—play with my Barbies and my button jar, with buttons from my mother, and dress up in scarves. We play hide-and-seek, the sieve of found and lost.

I hope I live long enough for legacy, despite lacunae in the white matter.

Sharon A. Johnson, Milwaukie

 

DDR with Me, Darling

Early on in our relationship, my boyfriend confessed that there was something he’d always wanted to try with a woman: Dance Dance Revolution. 

“You can play the game by yourself,” he said. “But with a partner, it feels like something that would only happen in a movie.” 

“Yeah.” I remember myself nodding. “Like that scene from Kissing Booth 2.”

“What?”

My boyfriend grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness, but had left the church two years prior. Now I was catching him up on all the classics, including pre-Euphoria Jacob Elordi. I gave him a plot summary: The main character, Elle, has to win a DDR tournament so she can put the prize money toward college. 

“That’s dystopian,” he said.

I said I would go with him to Ground Kontrol, a futuristic, fluorescent arcade in Old Town. It was mostly pinball. The marbles ricocheted so loudly I could have lost mine. The DDR machine stood quiet in the corner, all by itself. 

It was also still in the original Japanese. Apparently I needed written English instructions to stay on beat. We got booted off within two choruses. I blamed the language barrier and my untied shoelaces. 

My boyfriend was a natural in slip-ons. He even leaned back on the bar behind the platform, the way they do in all the movies he’s never seen. 

That’s what no one tells you about dating somebody raised in an insular religion. Sure, you can have a twenty-plus-year head-start on “worldly” things, pop culture references, and Netflix originals. He’ll still get a better letter grade on his DDR performance. 

On our next date, my partner took my hand and told me how wonderful it felt to finally have a “normal” life, or at least one with me. I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. I told him we could play DDR again, if he wanted to. Together, we could do-si-do on easy mode.

Jillian Jackson, Portland

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