Dancing With The Stars In Aspen

April 18th, 2006 at 07:11am Michael Conniff 2

That was him outside Jimmy’s Friday night—unmistakably him with the big smile heading down the stairs into Cache-Cache or Campo di Fiori to no doubt eat as well as a man can eat. He was small for a star but then aren’t all stars growing smaller and smaller? You want them to be bigger because they are so big up on the small screen, and bigger still in our imagination, where we have seen them in so many guises we no longer know what is real.

That’s the nature of Star Americana. The movies are still big: it’s just the stars that got small.

But the stars in Aspen do exert a gravitational pull that pulls prices of all kinds right up there with them in the stratosphere. They come here at least in part to be stars, to experience stardom Their celebrity gives them force—a force field that literally changes matter as they move past. You turn, you look, you nudge the one who matters most to you and tilt your head in the direction of the new gravitational field. You whisper: “Patrick Swayze.” He was once the subject of a Barbara Walters Special: it doesn’t get any bigger than that. As stars go, he is big enough, the co-star of “Ghost” and the undeniably dancing star of “Dirty Dancing.” He is the patron saint of dancing and his very presence in Aspen sets off forces that dance in ways that no one will ever explain.

The man you work with is going dancing to tango in a way that seems to have transformed his entire outlook about women, about love, about life. The bat-mitzvah at the St. Regis the very next night is all about dancing, people roundabout in concentric rings moving in opposite directions, and then moving together and then apart, somehow joyous and united and alive in a way that only dancing can deliver. There is hip-hop and disco and soul and The Hustle at the St. Regis and before you know it there are parents and their children dancing on chairs in defiance of gravity, dancing so high you fear for their lives.

Dancing is everywhere this weekend, but not at Syzygy, where you have been told the dancing Friday and Saturday nights is not to be believed. Even so there is the sound of shouting and stomping coming from way over your head in the middle of downtown, a band playing for a hardy band of locals getting as high as you can get, in the upper reaches of the hidden sanctum of the Elks Club.

The man coming off the elevator says, unbidden: “You’re going to have a great time.” And you do. The Mayor is there, having the time of her, and there is no room on the dance floor, so you literally cut the rug. There is something in the air, something precious and inexplicable. Close your eyes and you just might see the ghost of Patrick Swayze, or the ghost of stars past.

Entry Filed under: Aspen, Dance, Nightlife, Fractional Post