The Stupid Shuffle

Here is something stupid people do in nightclubs. I seen it with my very own two eyes. The night is moving along nicely and the beautiful people are busy laying the groundwork for a possible crotch-to-buttock application scenario and then suddenly, there is a lull in the music and the DJ puts on this song they call the "Cupid Shuffle". And what happens? The Stupid takes over. Takes over everybody. Don't matter if you're a salesgirl from Macys or a professor of advanced thermodynamics from Princeton with tenure. When the song comes on, if at that moment you find yourself on the dance floor, you are obligated to and will have to perform the Cupid Shuffle. It begins with everybody filing into a military type formation in multiple rows. At this point it would be wise to steal a quick glance at the person beside you in order to gauge the degrees of freedom you will be afforded during the shuffle. And then the shuffle begins.

The song consists of a series of instructions to the audience on how and where to position their bodies for the next few minutes. It goes like this :

“To the right, to the right, to the right, to the right”. Here, Mr Cupid expects you to slide your body to the right. You can do the bare minimum, as in just walk over to the right. Or if you are a humongous fan of the song, you could perform some kind of elaborate hand-leg routine while doing it.

Next, the song goes :

“To the left, to the left, to the left, to the left”. Now you have to go walk to the left. If you hate walking, too late, pal.

“Now kick, now kick, now kick, now kick”. Here it is mandated that you kick your feet in front you, making sure you only kick one foot at a time. You may laugh now but when you are in that room, the stupid can get to you.

“Now walk it by yourself, now walk it by yourself”. This is probably the most difficult move in the song because you are being asked to walk it by yourself while being in the midst of a human limb porridge. But don't lose heart, just do your best. Think of yourself as being in a vast meadow with no one in sight and just the blue sky reaching out to the horizon. As far as you are concerned, you are now walking it by yourself. By the way, don't you wish you were actually in that meadow instead of in this shithole, walking left and right and kicking at stuff?

Now granted, I have no first hand experience of how it feels to do the Cupid Shuffle, having contented myself with watching other people doing it (kind of a common theme of my life), but regardless, I still have a really hard time trying to fathom the source of pleasure these people experience while doing the shuffle. Or is it that Americans will obey any set of asinine instructions as long as they have been delivered in rap form? Case in point, even in today's dire economy with the banks tumbling and the jobs disappearing and stock market crashing, if a rapper asks us to wave our hands in the air as if we just don't care, will we tell him to kindly fuck off? No, we will stop caring and start waving. Why? Because he's got the full authority of a beat behind him. And if you don't, well, as a wise lady once said, "the Rhythm's gonna get you."