Dancing Bear, an essay
April 29, 2006
All over the country, as Good Americans attended standardized Easter observances that have lost all original relevance (given that Easter is named for Oestre, goddess of the dawn, and predates Christianity by a gazillion years), I was jammed into a living room between a man in a leopardskin dress and a woman wearing sparkly ‘faerie’ wings, listening to a waif play whale song on a cello.
Because, you know, this is Maui.
I was a stranger to the horde, having been invited to the evening’s event in a sort of sideways manner via a former resident of the house. Dressed in understated black and carrying a bottle of wine, I realized almost immediately that I should have worn a belly dancing outfit and brought a hand-carved wooden bowl of mead. The hugging, the natural fibers, the bone and shell necklaces, the flowy pantaloony things, the essential oils, the vegan food, the interpretive dance, the white-people dreadlocks and turbans—I knew these people. I’d seen them all in the cramped little aisles of the health food store, carefully reading labels while the organic kale poked out of their handmade shopping bags (Rastafarian colors).
Every single one of them was as white and formerly culturally Anglo as Bing Crosby and Betty Crocker. Renamed Harmony and Marley now, they’d undertaken the transformation to a kinder, gentler faux ethnicity. More power to them. It’s tough to be Susan Smith from Poughkeepsie when your soul yearns to be on a camel laden with spices crossing the Sahara under a spray of stars, instead of dying slowly behind the counter at The Gap. Dear sweet retro Maui, still with one foot in 1969, coddles such transformations while the pot plants on the mountainside sway in the trade winds and the psychedelic mushrooms peek flirtily up from cow patties over on the rainy side of the island.
What’s an interloper from Babylon to do but get a good seat next to the bean dip, dominate the wine bottle, and see what’s what?
Moony guitar strumming, chiming and gonging, a hearty round of OM chanting—these were the warm-up acts for the night’s true “offering”, two actors embodying Kibran’s Prophet and Christianity’s Jesus, both of them alternating the acting out of immortal spiritual passages from The Prophet and, from what I could gather, Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. The man who acted out passages from The Prophet was tall and wise and calm and did a serviceable job conveying the meaning and tone of the much-loved work. The man who portrayed Jesus, however, was a whole ‘nother kettle o’ fish (andl oaves)(sorry, couldn’t resist the joke). He’d been striding about the gathering masterfully for some time before the hour of the performance, weaving his way through the pad thai-noshing crowd with his eagle-headed staff, fur bits a-dangle from the shaft. Covered in thunderbird tattoos and with black ripply hair down to his flowy pantaloons, he cut through the sardine-packed rooms like Moses through the Dread Sea. He owned this crowd, clearly, and in return they adored him.
I knew him, too. Dancing Bear.
Many months previous, I’d been working my way through the wine and dessert menu of a local coffeehouse/wine bar during Open Mic Night. My friend Chris and I reclined and debated the merits of Old World and New World reds in the quiet spaces between the sonic assault of amateur songcrafting and covers of James Taylor songs re-imagined as jazz. And then a long-tressed, tattooed man took the small stage, tossed his black ripply locks over his bare shoulder, leaned his staff against the brick wall behind him, and began to rant the poetry of misunderstood, mistreated children loudly, angrily, confrontationally, and the whole room took on the feel of startled people resisting the urge to crawl under the tasteful little tables, especially the people near the stage.
And now here he was again, undeniably charismatic and actually extremely talented, as it turned out, portraying Jesus as a hip, slang-o-licious present-day poetry-slam veteran. Jesus with all the newest lingo and a story to tell, Jesus with a hip-hop recording contract and something to lay down for y’all, yo.
And he was fascinating, yes. And very, very good. But I could hear the traces of a Philly accent, or maybe Hoboken, slide out through the careful phrasing of this good actor. And it got me to thinking, as I imagined Dancing Bear as a child, how he must have looked with close-cropped tight black curls and tennis shoes in fifth grade, long before the need to be someone else became so demanding. How he might have been Howie Lowenstien, or Joey Wiess, kicking a can down the street between the brownstone houses. How it might have been before the thunderbird tattoo spread blue across his chest, the pain of acquiring it obliterating the memory and masking the older pain of whatever it was that required him to scream about the holocaust of childhood to merlot drinkers cowering in their cast-iron chairs in a coffeehouse. I wondered what peyote ceremony or sage-smoke-filled purifying sweat lodge changed Joey to Dancing Bear, and how long he would carry an eagle-headed staff before he got tired of the weight of that and of everything else he’d picked up on the long road from Hoboken to Maui, and the weight of everything he didn’t want to look at anymore.
