Free Your Ass and Your Liquor License Will Follow

Jesse Walker | June 5, 2007

Barbara Ehrenreich stands up for the right to dance:

Compared with most of the issues that the venerable American civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel takes up, this one may seem like the ultimate in urban frivolity: Late last month, he joined hundreds of hip-hoppers, salsa dancers, Lindy Hoppers and techno-heads boogying along Fifth Avenue to protest New York City's 80-year-old restrictions on dancing in bars.

But disputes over who can dance, how and where, are at least as old as civilization, and arise from the longstanding conflict between the forces of order and hierarchy on the one hand, and the deep human craving for free-spirited joy on the other....

The whole column is here. Ehrenreich's book Dancing in the Streets is reviewed here. Pictures of the dance parade are here. George Clinton gets a Letterman audience to dance here. Learn to dance like Napoleon Dynamite here.