Big Brother Skateboarding
November 2002

BREAKIN’ IT DOWN

Like Britney Spears’ rack, behold it.


MOVIN’, GROOVIN’, AND IMPROVIN’

Two short weeks after I placed a call to the Dance Grooves hotline to order DDG, the video arrived in the mail. As I held the shrink-wrapped box in my hands, beads of sweat covered my entire body and I began to shake. The package bore the patented DDG logo, an outline drawing of two bodies united in motion that looked something like the Hindu God Ganesh.

I trembled because it was at this moment that I knew that the easiest part of our groove battle was behind us. The video promised to reveal the secrets behind the dance routines for Bitney Spears’ Crazy and N’Sync’s Bye, Bye, Bye.

Fucking sweet.

Many long, hard hours of intense practice lay between us and our goal of shaking and shivering like Justin Timberlake doppelgangers.

But if we made it across this no man’s land of motion, riddled as it was with landmines of funk and the insidious mustard gas of motor skills confusion, I knew we stood the chance of challenging the mighty throne of power occupied by Henson himself.

And so our journey began on a blustery Southern California Tuesday in the office of Dave ‘The Darkness’ Carnie.

As we popped the video into the VCR in his office, we were treated to a short video bio of Henson’s life and achievements followed by an inspirational speech from the Man Himself.

His hair pulled back in tight cornows, giant diamonds blingin’ in his ears, and a pencil thin, yet carpet thick and well-manicured, goatee on his chin, the D bomb dropped wisdom like Mohatmas K.

“Years of staying focused went into achieving those dreams,” Henson said of his own accomplishments with a wink and smile. “So you know what you’ve gotta do.”

We didn’t have years. None of us have very long attention spans. And given how injury prone my friends on staff at Big Brother are, it was conceivable that a blown-out ACL could derail the process at any moment.

So I figured we had three or four practice sessions max to attain our goal of becoming dance Gods.

I remember looking at Dave at that moment and nodding. Yeah, I thought, if Jesus could die on the cross for the sins of all humanity without ever having gotten laid and Darrin Henson was able to get to where he was, then our dreams had to be within reach, too.

Dave called down the hall to Tyler and Steve the Intern as he rummaged through a box of schwag and suited up in a windbreaker, calf-high shmantz with drawstrings, and a pair of snowboarding gloves.

I had come similarly equipped, and with attitude to fucking boot.

We were gonna rock this bitch like a rodeo bull with a rope cinched around its nutsack.

We were gonna take it to the fucking top.


THE THREE -ATION’S: INSPIRATION, DEDICATION, AND PERSPIRATION
“While I dance I cannot judge, I cannot hate, I cannot separate myself from life. I can only be joyful and whole. That is why I dance.” --Hans Bos

As Steve, Tyler, Dave, and I stood in a line facing the VCR waiting like so many organic, farm-raised, all-natural sponges to absorb the wisdom of Darrin at that first practice, there was an electricity in the air, an electricity of the sort not seen since Ben Franklin raised high his kite and key and waited for lightning to strike.

I stepped forward nervously to push play. It was at that moment that the flood of current that is DDG poured into the room and like a robot plugged into its power source, we came to life.

Two things became immediately clear: 1. Steve the Intern was obviously a closeted DDG-aholic, because he was bustin’ the sick, stupid moves we saw on the screen as if he was born doing them and 2. The video was going to be the biggest obstacle to our success.

As I watched the video and tried desperately to keep up with the explosive dance gymnastics of Steve the Intern while we tried to learn the first eight counts of the Britney Spears ‘Crazy’ video dance routine, I imagined millions of eleven year old girls across America who had saved up their allowance for weeks to buy DDG lying on the floor in front of their TV/VCR’s in halter tops and skin-tight vinyl pants as they cried and pounded their fists into the wall-to-wall shag carpeting in frustration.

Keeping up with the crazed pace of Darrin and his crew of corn-rowed dance pros was virtually impossible. It didn’t help matters that Darrin was facing us thus making his directional commands appear to be backwards.

Goddammit, I thought to myself, how the fuck am I ever going to make it to the top of the dance game with this piece of shit tape as my guide? But Darrin would never give up. After all, it had taken him years of focus to get where he was. So I wasn’t going to give up either.

Apparently undaunted by the panoply of significant obstacles, Steve raved on like a second-gen New Kid on the Block. Tyler, Dave, and I, meanwhile, struggled on bravely. Dave was so enthused, in fact, that he stepped to the front of the line and blocked everyone’s view of the screen for long periods of time.

I was trying so hard I nearly unleashed a furious yellow stream down my hiked-up right pant leg. But I didn’t, and after a few more runs through the routine, I was body-rocking back and forth along with the whole crew. We weren’t N’Sync—not yet anyway—but we were in synch.

And we were on the rise.

After a round of high-fives and bro hugs, we adjourned and vowed to practice with the fury of drunken berzerkers hacking at horse-mounted Huns.

NUMBER TWO—THE BIG ONE: LOOKIN’ GOOD AND REPRAZENTIN’ HARD

Darrin had to combine his street-wise locking and popping with ballet and hip hop dancing to come up with his special DDG blend of moves.

At some point, Dave had aired his desire to include a synchronized dance routine in the next Big Brother video. Clearly, if our dancing was ever going to go to the next level, we were going to have to do some Darren-esque innovating.

It was at practice number two that we made major strides. Sure, we practiced along with Henson and his gang just as we had at the previous practice, but we also made sure to stop, drop, and break it down with some hot freestyle sessions that had more than one passer-by staring up at Carnie’s opulent, sprawling corner office from where they stood down on Wilshire Boulevard.

That’s how hot and shiny our moves were.

It certainly helped matters that General Kosick motivated for this practice. Still hampered by a knee that wasn’t at 100% as we used to say back in ‘Nam, Kosick brought the strength of a bear and speed of a puma to the table and dished out punishing original moves that we knew would be devastating when properly used within the context of our original routine.

Our dirty five was slammin’ so hard we were starting to look like a half dozen. Helene and Heather couldn’t resists stepping into the office and raising the roof in our honor.

But such was our intensity that we barely noticed their presence. As we drilled over and over, we all knew that something special was happening. It was the kind of feeling that only comes along once or twice in a generation, the kind of feeling I imagine Chuck Yeager felt as he arced across the sky hurling towards the sound barrier and then broke through it with the sledge hammer of his will and the marvels of first-generation supersonic aerospace technology.

For a few minutes we were divorced from the time-space continuum and floated high above the earth, soaring on the sweet ether of pure dance inspiration.

We had united. We had blasted off.

And there would be no stopping us now. Not even a dance tape with bad lighting and poor instruction.


ONE NATION UNDER GROOVE
“I am absorbed in the magic of movement and light. Movement never lies. It is the magic of what I call the outer space of imagination. There is a great deal of outer space, distant from our daily lives, where I feel our imagination wanders sometimes. It will find a planet or it will not find a planet, and that is what a dancer does.” --Martha Graham

After a third rehearsal that saw similarly devastating moves dished out like hot gravy on the carpeted floor of Carnie’s office, we vowed to push on until we had a full routine mastered and ready to shoot.

But then the winds of change blew and like the dimming light of autumn, the exigencies of reality reigned in our ambitions. Dave had to leave town to go to Australia, then Vancouver, then France, and in the absence of the hallowed practice space that his office afforded, things fell apart.

There has been no dancing since. But we are an elite and dedicated team, and nothing can stop us now. While Darrin’s Dance Grooves were disappointing, they did provide us with a springboard that that set our bodies into luminous motion at a frightening velocity.

We have escaped the tyranny of inertia. We dance now because it is in our blood, our bodies, our souls. And nothing will stop us.

Soon you will see.

You will see that nothing will stop us.