Freaking out with bananas and grapes

My earliest experiences with dance were at home, years before Lindy Hop classes at Tras Street or Salsa sessions at Orchard Guild House. They happened at our flat in Laguna Park, which was the favourite venue for my maternal aunts and uncles during the durian season. Their collective decision had apparently little to do with consumption of the stinking, heaty fruit, but with the live entertainment that was on hand.

I don’t remember this with any clarity, but there is pre-PhotoShop photographic evidence and thus must be true. All it took was a flick of the record player's ON switch and I would bust out, kitted out in my floor length, cap-sleeved light blue nightie and shaking my 6 year old booty for all that it was worth. My most beloved hits were Le Freak's Freak Out and Boney M's Brown Girls in the Ring –Tra la la la la.

Daren and I often performed as a duo and we had taken great pains to devise a sequence of moves that we proudly called our Banana Dance. This was a somewhat high investment routine as it involved four of the aforementioned fruit, ripe, one in each hand. It was a King Kong crossed with Beatles groupie arm-swinging dance, with a little hip-jiggling and a most gripping finale, the driving of our tiny thumbs through the bananas.

A related performance, the Grape Dance, had the large seedless grapes wedged between our molars, ready to be squeezed and squirted onto each other –when we performed on our own- or on the audience. That practice was quickly banned by our parents because our relatives didn’t quite relish being covered in sweetish, murky kidspit.

Guess it wasn't their idea of good, clean fun.