You're at the laundromat waiting for the washer cycle to finish and reading a magazine about local industry in your town and your eye fixes on a box advertising air dancers. Huh? Because it seems to be your natural tendency to make random meaning out of phrases that perplex you, you start visualizing:
Out of the clouds they drift, tap dancing down rainbows, sliding down lightning bolts. Hold on to your hats, folks--the air dancers are coming!
Now the wash cycle is complete and you transfer your clothes to the dryer. But still, you can't get the air dancers out of your mind. What are these things?
You thought you'd heard it all:
- Riverdance
- The dance of nature
- Dancing with stars
- Dance of the wind
- Dance of the sugar plum fairy
- The dance of the planets
- The dance of time
- Dancing Wu Li Masters
- Dancing bears
- Dancing birds
- Dancing waves
You Wrack Your Brain
You leave the laundromat and take a walk, trying to sort this out.
Since it's summer, you speculate if this is a reference to Painted Ladies and Monarchs of the butterfly kingdom that swarm your sedum garden, bellying up to the pollen bars now serving summer's delectable nectar.
Or if were fall, perhaps it'd be a poetic way to talk about the leaves that swirl in the wind presaging winter's imminent arrival.
Your brain reels. Do snowflakes dance in winter? Actually, they waltz.
You remember a classic poem, "DIE DANS VAN DIE REËN," which means "The Dance of the Rain."
Then there's Audrey Hepburn, who could have danced all night when she was Eliza Doolittle and could have spread her wings and done a thousand things she'd never done before.
There are the Flying Wallendas, who could perhaps be called air dancers.
All kinds of things dance, it seems.
On YouTube, you can even find GIFs of cute dancing animals, hilarious dancing babies.
It's None of Those
Upon reflection, you realize it could be a sort of general reference to a bunch of those. Really, anything that moves with air in such a way as to reveal air's motion could be described as an air dancer.
And then you see it, up ahead, where those people are gathered in the strip mall parking lot--what you can only describe as a giant inflatable tubular man boogying in the wind. Why, he must be 20 feet tall! And look how he sways back and forth, now down, now up. "Dude's got moves," you exclaim aloud to the other folks gathered around. "But why's he got Hoagies tattooed across his torso?"
"He's one of those advertising air dancers," someone explains to you. "See, right over there's a new sandwich shop!"
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