You need to be dancing.

Everything was on fire.

I knew it. The boy grabbing my hips on the dance floor knew it. And the way the DJ was playing, they knew it too.

I let the world slip away into the rhythm. And when I tuned back in, we were all outside.

My friend Andy was smoking and complaining about the cocktails; the lady we met at the bar chimed in, "They used to be $4." She's maybe thirty-two at most, and yet the sentiment is so foreign to me she might as well be talking about the days when burgers cost cents.

I pass Andy a shooter from my purse, and he puts it in his vodka soda. Cheap, effective, and enough to get us back out on the dance floor.

I'm not out of touch; I read the headlines this morning: war, tyranny, disease, and hunger across the world and in the States.

I balanced my checking and savings to make sure we could make groceries and gas for the rest of the month, and to my luck, I sneak away just enough for fun to not feel guilty. Still, I see the privilege in the act.

At the station, I give the clerk $7: 5 for gas, 2 for a 99-cent shooter. I pack it away with the other two that survived the summer. This, the gas and the shooter, will sustain the joy I need to reach tonight, to erase the feeling I have in my heart. If I dance long enough, something will replace it.

Did you know dancing is proven to help lower cortisol and stress levels? It reduces anxiety and depression symptoms, alters brain function, improves memory, and it's good cardio. A natural stress reliever passed down through tradition and history.

Tonight, it is alive and well in Houston's growing club scene.

My tips for a successful night out:

To have a good night, you have to chase the DJ.

When you hear a sound you like, let the thread guide you to the right places.

To have a good night, you have to get out of your head and put your phone down.

TO HAVE A GOOD NIGHT YOU HAVE TO BE DANCING.

While older generations groan on about how music is dying, the young people aren't dancing, and that clubbing is dead. Over the past couple of years, there has been a new sound rising from the south. Southern Club brings a new heartbeat to the dance floor, blending electronic with southern sound.

Artists Hyperfemme, Big Ace, and Amarji King established the subgenre back in 2023, and they are just a few of the many young artists bringing to life new sounds, new genres, and new spaces to the nightlife scene.

The pandemic, cellphones, and social media induced fear of embarrassment, hand in hand with section culture, make going out feel unbearable.

Today's DJs are changing the narrative, not only in sound, but in how they transform dance floor culture. HyperAce, Club Shugga, and other parties dedicated to music, movement, and community are giving clubs a comeback.

The same is happening all over the states; People want to get together, people want to dance, and if the traditional clubs aren't going to step up, the underground will have to.

Every week the list of where to go grows longer, whether you see it on your for you page or not. Tonight I'm one of the many that flooded in for Identity Trade's TrackID, a monthly dance party in Montrose; There's a certain something special in the air.

Sometimes I don't want to sit at the bar and look around for an hour. I don't want to spend $60 getting into some club with a line wrapped around the building where inside everyone just stares at each other. I think the tougher the world gets, the more I realize we need to be dancing.

Signs like "no requests, trust the DJ " and "The dance floor is for shaking ass, breakdancing, grinding, voguing, housing, connection. GET OFF YOUR PHONE AND DANCE" line the walls. MISSY, Identity Trade's resident DJ, spins tonight, and as we dance, everything falls into place. I'm nothing, I'm everything.

The bass encapsulates us, and when my feet finally grow tired, I head downstairs for a bathroom run.

The hefty weight of existing right now is no match for the resistance forming in the downstairs girls' bathroom.

"AND F- TRUMP" some girl says. The bathroom erupts in cheers.

I wait in line next to a tall girl with tequila on her breath. We talk about the video that has been trending all week of Trump talking about running for a third term; eerily, the internet couldn't decide if he was really joking or not.

She leans over and says, "He's going to try and stay." She says it like she's seen the future; I don't know what to say back.

I had seen the video just like everyone else. I had seen the website of him selling Trump 2028 merch. I wanted to wave it off, another attempt at capitalization from a con man who can sell a secret, but not of a serious man; still, that's what they said when he ran the first time.

"I hope not" was the most I could muster. "Me too," she continued. From the stall, my friend Teri yells, "He won't. We won't let him. We got rights for a reason." There was laughter in her voice, but the tone of the room grew gloomy anyway. What did that mean these days, rights? Then someone gasps and says, "I love this song."

We can hear the bass from upstairs, the party happening in a different room, and suddenly I long to spin under flashing fluorescents, replace one dizzy feeling with another.

We need to be dancing. Come close to me, stranger, let our hearts beat to the same vibration. We'll meet our troubles in the daylight.

As I return to the dance floor, I shuffle my way into the crowd, and everything is alive here.

Sometimes the weeks pass, the news gets darker and the days get harder, and I forget the world isn't just work, tragedy, and keeping your head above water. I let the monotony of doomscrolling distract me from the vibrancy of life.

Here, I forget myself, allow the waves of bodies to crash against my own; I'm alive again too.

It all still exists out there. Tomorrow I’ll have to research food banks, how to start a garden, and what to do once gas gets higher. I’ll text my mother and try not to worry beyond my control, a task I can never seem to accomplish.

Tomorrow is a new day, but tonight, in the hours where yesterday and tomorrow meet, I'm dancing. This will get me through, and as the cycle goes on, so do I.

I consider the Alice Walker quote: "Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is the proof."

I let my body release the tension it had been holding all week, and badly twist and twirl without the fear that there's a camera capturing the moment; we only exist here and now.

We dance and dance and dance, and when I'm dancing, I'm free; they only win when I stop.

We need to be dancing.

When Therapy is Your Favorite Crowd Work

Why do I enjoy making my therapist laugh more than the open mic crowd?

It's more common than we think. 

My first answer to my own question was “there's more gratification in winning over a ‘tougher’ crowd”. But I was immediately proved wrong by the grating memory of the typical open mic crowd in NYC I know so well.

The 6 PM slot at the Stand or Pine Box Rock Shop sometimes feels worse than recounting events of abuse to a professional.

Once I described bombing at an open mic in Brooklyn as bad as sharing an armrest with someone at the DMV who plays TikToks at max volume, but I think I was wrong. 

It's often times worse <3.

Maybe it's my grumpy disposition towards these situations that made me favor the sympathetic chuckle during a service that I pay too much for?

What makes open mics and the DMV great in theory is that everyone is miserable together, joined by a greater shared mission of dick jokes or a name change on their ID. 

This shared camaraderie should make me feel inclined to find more joy in those moments of community with strangers, right? Wrong.

For some reason, getting a hearty giggle out of Christina during our 6 PM sessions offered a different thrill for me.

“Well”, I asked myself, “maybe it's the possibility that you're always following a tough act in therapy; everyone with a shitty set loves an even shittier opener”.  I could be the runner-up to a married couple in resentful turmoil, a traumatized teen, or a woman on the edge. 

Another plausible point was presented to me: one of the reasons I pay Christina $70 every Wednesday at 6PM, is to tell me I'm a good person. That could also be it.

Ultimately, whatever motivation I overanalyzed so successfully to discover was a failure.

Facing these thoughts eventually led to late-night scrolling, which landed me where all emotionally healthy comics rest their head: Reddit. 

It turns out I'm not alone! Comics, regular citizens, even therapists with therapists all experience this joy ride I keep getting on when a middle-aged woman with a PhD laughs at my pain. 

Different people had different reasons: masochism, the life events that landed them in therapy, suspected narcissism, boredom, and the inability to get more than 5 minutes at the mic.

Whew! 

Thank God I've found a new mode of camaraderie with a group of people who also spend too much time thinking about themselves and asking if it's normal.

That was a close one!

All of my personal pondering led to one truth I have to become comfortable with: I like to share a laugh with people I shouldn't, more often than with ones I essentially beg for. 

And for the price of $70 weekly, I'll take a laugh where I can get it.

So thanks to Reddit and my (healing) anxious attachment, I'll be here all night, folks (and for 50 minutes, Christina).

How “The Ugly Stepsister” Painfully Explores the Need to be Beautiful

I’ve watched the trailer for Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister over 5 times now. It all started when my best friend sent me the trailer on Instagram and I was immediately intrigued. The idea of reworking Cinderella into a horror movie from the perspective of one of her stepsisters sounded like an excellent way of embracing the story’s grim (pun very much intended) roots. Past versions of the tale have featured cannibalism and various forms of mutilation, yet the classic Disney film has remained the prevalent iteration. Aside from Steven Sondheim’s Into the Woods, I had yet to see a Cinderella story that fully leaned into the gory elements that existed alongside the pumpkin carriages and fairy godmothers.

As a bass beat punctuates the trailer, questions start to flash on screen:

“Do you ever feel inferior? Unworthy? Ashamed? Rejected? Invisible?” and finally “Ugly?”

The last word, which continues to flash on screen as the titular stepsister, Elvira (Lea Myren) sits down in front of her vanity. Elvira herself is far from being ugly. Myren is a very pretty actress who looks like she could play Anya Taylor-Joy’s younger sister. But this movie isn’t called The Already Pretty Stepsister, so certain steps have to be taken in order to let audiences know that Elvira is indeed the ugly stepsister.

Frankly, Elvira’s mother lives up to the title of Evil Stepmother because she’s decided to stick this poor girl with an obnoxious pile of sausage curls overflowing her head and completely overwhelming her soft, delicate features while throwing copious amounts of stiff, brown fabric onto her small frame. The torture is topped with a stack of bows that look like a mess of whipped cream atop this Kibbe system nightmare. Of course, all of this serves to emphasize the beauty of our Cinderella, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess).

Agnes appears to us looking perfectly put together with her historically inaccurate half-ponytail with relaxed beachwaves and her simple yet elegant pale blue dress, which only makes her bright blue eyes stand out. Brief shots of half-eaten cakes and cinnamon rolls crammed into drawers, a close-up shot of Elvira’s stomach, and glimpses of her braces are further meant to alert audiences that Elvira is, in fact, ugly. It’s not enough that (for some reason) her clothes are unflattering to her features, but apparently, her body is also far from the ideal that Agnes apparently embodies.Elvira is not ugly, but she just happens to have all of the supposed signifiers of ugliness. The only reason why she does not appear as put-together as Agnes is that her mother is possessed by the vengeful spirit of a stylist who’s obsessed with heaping bows and curls onto a petite person with pixie-like features. As for her body, Elvira barely looks any different from any of the other girls in her dance class. Sure, the camera focuses on her stomach after eating one of the several sweets hidden in her drawers, but it’s nothing abnormal or shocking. By all means, it is a completely normal body. So when we see Elvira’s nose gruesomely cracked open by a terrifying plastic surgeon (appropriately named Dr. Esthetique), it hurts in more ways than one.

It’s an image that is all too familiar. A girl who looks perfectly fine, even pretty if only her mother would stop, insisted on pairing sausage curls with gigantic bows, going to extreme lengths to completely change everything about herself rather than emphasizing the beauty that is already there. Unfortunately, for many people, and especially young women, these are the types of growing pains that we experience.

A ScreenRant review by Mae Abdulbaki describes how beauty in this world is viewed:“As a performance, as status, as a means to attract and remain valuable in the eyes of society." Beauty is essentially a currency amongst women, and the extensive procedures that Elvira puts herself through are the labor needed to earn it. She screams in pain with blood leaking from her eyes after having false eyelashes directly sewn onto her eyelids, all for the attention of Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth). The film is listed as a horror-comedy, but those who identify with Elvira’s struggles know that it is truly a tragedy. One review that flashes on screen during the trailer calls the film “savagely brutal and yet strangely beautiful.” A description that is ironic, given the way that Blichfeldt’s intentions seem to be to rip beauty standards apart limb from limb, as blood spatters onto a horrified audience. Personally, I’m all for it. If Elvira’s torture feels visceral (one audience member threw up during one sequence during its Cannes showing), that’s because it is forcing the audience to feel what nearly every young girl has had to feel on the inside as she grew up. “Savagely brutal and yet strangely beautiful.”

While it may even be frustrating to see Elvira viciously mutilating herself for the attention of one man she barely knows, how many of us have been like her? Cassie Howard (Sydney Sweeney) has faced similar criticism for the insanely intricate morning routine she subjects herself to just to gain a little bit of attention from Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi). But unless you can confidently admit to yourself that you’ve never gone to any lengths just for the attention of a crush, none of us is any better.

Even without a romantic interest, we live in a society that immediately judges people based on their physical appearances. Lori Baker-Sperry and Liz Grauerholz write how “it is acknowledged that many women willingly engage in ‘beauty rituals’ and perceive being (or becoming) beautiful as empowering, not oppressive.” This idea is made more complex with the frequent promotion of “self-care” and “wellness” by social media. We may not view multi-step skincare routines or smoothie recipes as beauty rituals because they have been wrapped in the idea that it is being done for yourself. But, let’s be honest here, “wellness” has simply replaced “beautiful,” and it is not a coincidence that the expected outcome of following these rituals is a “glow-up” in the form of a slimmer body, smoother skin, and more voluminous hair. These rituals are meant to lead to the achievement of beauty standards.

“The social advantages of pretty privilege are many: good-looking people come off smart, capable, trustworthy, and generally morally virtuous.”

On the other end of the spectrum is the unfairly gorgeous Agnes. Silently judging Elvira while looking effortlessly ethereal in an Elle-Fanning-as-Sleeping-Beauty type of way. Although she meets beauty standards in a way that Elvira does not, she, too, is dependent on her beauty to move herself forward in the world. The Aarne-Thompson-Uther folklore index categorizes Cinderella under type 510A — Persecuted Heroine. While it would have been easy to place Agnes/Cinderella into the role of villain to Elvira’s persecuted heroine, Agnes is not any better off. As previously mentioned, beauty is a currency, and Agnes only happens to have an abundance of it.

As a young woman without a father or a dowry, Agnes must rely on her pretty privilege to catch the attention of the wealthy prince. According to Sable Yong for Time Magazine, “the social advantages of pretty privilege are many: good-looking people come off smart, capable, trustworthy, and generally morally virtuous.” Elvira temporarily gains this advantage sometime after she swallows a tapeworm egg to eat away her body weight, and her hair begins to fall out in clumps. Whether she likes it or not, she has become beautiful. But it’s still not enough. Yong writes that pretty privilege “calls for a kind of beauty that appears convincingly ‘natural’ in order to imbue positive associations of goodness and moral virtue.” As painful as those procedures may have been, it is no match for the beauty that Agnes was born with.

“A kind of beauty that appears convincingly ‘natural’ in order to imbue positive associations of goodness and moral virtue.” The penultimate moment comes when Elvira holds up a meat cleaver, preparing to chop off her toes. Besides the moment when the slipper fits Cinderella, this is one of the most famous scenes of the Cinderella story. Elvira has gone through hell and back to forge herself into the living doll that she thought the prince wanted. But Agnes, even with her face obscured, has managed to destroy everything that she has worked towards. When we see her glaring down at her own foot, there is a sense that it was never just for the prince. The whole world has told Elvira that in order to be valued, she must be beautiful. All of those surgeries and procedures were ways of punishing herself for failing to embody beauty standards in the same way that Agnes does. But we all know how the story of Cinderella ends. Only one stepsister will get her happily ever after.

Read the original post here: https://medium.com/@jdvaldep2/the-stepsister-was-never-ugly-how-the-ugly-stepsister-painfully-explores-the-need-to-be-a47fd855a156