They arrived in everything from Crocs to stilettos, sporting updos, mullets and even cancer wigs.
Some had belly rings. Some were braless. Some covered themselves wrist to ankle in the modest ways of their religions.
Whatever they wore, they came together for one reason: to dance, as Mark Twain put it, like nobody was watching.
“Somebody stop me,” whooped Micky Lee, a Littleton homemaker doing the Funky Chicken in her first dance night since Britney Spears’ Mousketeer days.
Welcome to Chicka Chicka Dance Dance, an all-women dance party at Lowry’s Soiled Dove Underground. Nearly 200 women gathered Sunday simply to get their groove back, if only for three hours.
“Nobody here is worried about taking care of their kids or their husbands. It’s like a return to high school, like a slumber party where you let go and dance with your girlfriends,” said librarian Ronnie Storey.
The doors opened at 6 o’clock, when one woman in nursing scrubs and another in skiwear arrived intent on hitting the dance floor. Others filed in with neighbors, coworkers and members of their church choir.
Then the DJ cranked up “Sexual Healing” and the party really started.
“God, I needed this,” said Lee, swaying to the Marvin Gaye classic as she described her day caring for two kids with rotavirus while her husband played golf. At one point, her daughter was vomiting so frequently that Lee threw herself in the line of fire, figuring it was easier to shower than spend another hour wiping down the couch.
“This is my time to recover,” said Lee, who finally got her mojo back sometime between “Respect” and “Burning Down the House.”
The crowd suspended most talk Sunday about kids and jobs and relationships. For three hours, there were no barriers between single and married, straight and lesbian and working and stay-at-home women as they all moved to the music with abandon.
Some, like Lee, hadn’t danced with friends since college.
Lowry homemaker Cindy Motz last danced at Regis High School’s “Mom Prom” with her son.
And many, like Betty Lamb, have given up trying to prod rhythm-challenged husbands to dance with them. The retired schoolteacher, 60, asked 10 friends to join her Sunday, but none did. So she hit the dance floor alone, confidently doing “The Twist” by herself — and far more artfully than others half her age.
Not all were so nimble.
Five Dansko-wearing feminist book clubbers struggled not to injure each other as they attempted The Bump to “You’re the One that I Want” from “Grease.”
Their stumbling and enthusiasm was precisely the point of Chicka Chicka Dance Dance. It is rare and wonderful to see so many women come together without judgment or inhibition, just to be silly and feel free.
Which brings me to Cheryl Grebe, a first-grade teacher from Arvada, and her old friend from Western State College, Boulder saleswoman Sue Fonda. I had never met these women until Sunday. Yet as the three of us danced to the disco anthem “Brick House,” they welcomed me into the rhythms of their 30-year friendship.
“Shake it down, shake it down now,” we sang, shimmying into an imaginary microphone. “Shake it down, shake it down now . . .”
We laughed — and kept dancing like nobody was watching.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
