BABY STEPS: Dancing In The Shower

I danced naked as a stream of water crashed against my chest. I gyrated in the steamy heat to the rhythm of the music. I leaned forward and flipped my wet hair against my back. I glided my hands along my wet skin. I swung my hips. I belted the lyrics.

I lathered. I rinsed. I repeated.

But as I stretched my naked leg over the small hurdle at the edge of the bathtub, reaching for my towel, something terrible happened. In the words of Don McLean, it was “the day the music died.”

I threw it to its death. I watched in horror as it fell into the water with a loud crash. I could hear it struggle to make a faint sound over the loud rush of water. I reached in to save it, but it was already too late. The faint whisper had been silenced. The words “water-resistant, not waterproof” from the instruction booklet flashed in my head.

It was a violent death. The shower CD player crashed against the sides of the fiberglass tub like a canoe in rough waters crashing against the rocks. The base was torn from the bottom and the speakers were clogged by the heavy rain of my shower head. I watched as the digital numbers of the radio station changed by themselves, climbing higher and higher, unaccompanied by any sound from the radio.

With my best Baywatch babe moves, sans the red bathing suit or my towel, I rescued the CD player from the cruel sea of my bathtub. I shook water out of its clogged speaker lungs with pulsating force. I pressed my ear against the speakers for a sign of life. I threw my bathrobe around myself and flung open the door, rushing to my room for some new-battery-CPR.

It was all in vain. The CD hung out of the clear sliding door to the CD player like the tongue out of a mouth suffocated by water. I dried Aretha Franklin’s Greatest Hits with the bottom of my plush white terry cloth robe.

Some people have their morning coffee; I had my shower CD player. I’ll always remember the good times we shared together.

I know you’ve sung into your hairbrush in front of the full-length mirror in your room or danced to the radio in your underwear. I say, why stop there? Why just lip-sync like your favorite vocally challenged pop-star when you can explore your full pop-star potential? Go all out.

Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera choose on any given day which parts of their bodies they want to cover with little scraps of cloth. Why be half-naked when you can be entirely naked and dripping beads of water? It’s a competitive job market. Show ’em what you’ve got.

And why lip-sync? Britney can’t sing; you shouldn’t worry about that either.

Now, the one thing most pop stars can do is dance. You may have heard the quote “dance like nobody’s watching, and love like it’s never going to hurt.” I can’t promise that love’s never going to hurt, but unless you know something about your roommate that I don’t, nobody’s watching if you’re dancing in the shower.

Some people need a little intoxication to loosen up. I just need a little sleep deprivation. Unfortunately, this is also the factor that led to the drowning death of my favorite appliance.

This wasn’t the first time my shower, with a little help from my fatigue-induced lapse in judgment has yielded disastrous consequences. Last year, I had begun my shower only to realize that my feet felt a bit squishy. I looked down and realized that I had failed to take off my slippers and the soft fabric had filled with water like two pink, fuzzy sponges. That was the end of my slippers.

There are always some setbacks on the rocky road to fame.

Let go of your inhibitions. Go wild. Just make sure you’re completely naked and out of the way of any major appliances.