Dancing as a Dino Is Good for the Soul

It is a difficult thing to be a dinosaur.

After a year-long stint of not leaving my house, I made the trek to my hometown to visit friends and family. What I was most worried about was not keeping up on my writing while away from home.

Luckily, thanks to some dumb luck on several of my former articles, I was able to purchase a shiny new laptop to use while away from my home computer. This, of course, wouldn’t guarantee the production of work, but at least it gave me the ability to try.

As I set out on the four-hour drive, I wondered if I would have anything to write about while gone. I’m a strange writer in the fact that I have a difficult time producing work when not in the comfort of my own home.

Writing in a quaint little cafe with the street music of other human beings all around sounds like absolute hell to me.

I like my stuff. My desk chair perfectly fits my bottom. The way my coffee cups feel in my fingertips provides countless bouts of inspiration. These are the tiny details that help me write, and without them, I worried that I would not be able to compose a single word while away.

It turns out my sister-in-law was reading my mind and had figured out how to solve these woes when planning for our arrival.

Ashley isn’t just a sister-in-law. She is also my lifelong friend. We were pals long before my brother proposed to her, and some might even say that it was me who brought these two love birds together. I keep mentioning this to them in an offhand way, and they keep laughing and telling me I need to get over myself. It’s fine. They will appreciate my monumental part in their lives one day and start treating me like the influential matchmaker I am.

“I’ve set you up in the camper,” Ash said as soon as I rolled into her driveway. “There’s Wi-Fi, power, and it’s quiet so you can do your writing in the morning and won’t get distracted.”

My sister-in-law is a genius when it comes to reno work and decorating. She purchased this old camper and has transformed the thing into one of those artful tiny homes that you see on home and garden shows. She is fantastic, and the space is perfect for a writer to get her words on.

Now, I just had to think of the material.

This did not prove difficult because I had forgotten one key thing about Ashley. She is an absolute blast. Five minutes after arriving, she asked, “Do you want to do a TikTok video with me?”

I’m not a huge fan of TikTok because of all the craptastic stuff I’ve seen in the media about the platform, so I was hesitant. But then she showed me the dance she wanted to recreate and told me she’d like it if we wore giant inflatable T-Rex costumes while doing it, and I was in immediately.

Learning a 20-second dance routine is a lot more complicated than one might expect.

The dance was simple as we rehearsed it in our shorts and tank tops. But then, as soon as we stepped into the dino-skins, with the small air compressors blowing away inside of our brains, it’s as though our ability to recollect simple dance-steps turned to fog, and we couldn’t remember a damn thing.

It didn’t help that we had a house full of kids who were intent on laughing at our efforts.

“Mom, you’re thinking about this too hard; just do the moves without worrying so much about doing the exact choreography. No one’s going to notice the inconsistencies because the suits are so huge,” Sophie said.

Sophie knows all about this sort of thing, so I figured I’d take her at her word.

Ashley held this thing together. There she was barking orders at me, and I was helpless to argue because clearly, she knew what the hell was going on and I was simply trying to follow her lead.

Being a dinosaur is a complicated thing. The pressure I was beginning to feel by the time hour 3 of rehearsal came around was burdensome. I was starting to wonder if this thing was ever going to come together.

Maybe the dancing dinosaur music video that so lovingly sashayed through our collective brains was only to remain in the sanctity of our mind’s eye.

At one point, I said as much to Ashley, and she was having none of it.

“We are going to do this, Lindsay! We have to,” she said not unlike a drill sergeant.

And persevere, we did! After many, many, many more retakes, we succeeded in our quest to create a 20-second dino-dance.

It was beautifully ridiculous and helped me realize that leaving the sanctuary of my safe space every once in a while is an excellent exercise in creative enlightenment.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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