The Power of Playful Invitations

How a "macarena moment" can make us feel less alone

It’s the official last day of summer in my family (our daughter returns to school tomorrow), and I have been on a mad dash to pack in as many end-of-summer experiences as I can. It’s all part of my endless, exhausting compulsion to “live life as fully as possible”¹ and not have regrets.²

For some reason this year I had gotten fixated on the idea that—in order for us to have fully summer-ed—we needed to tube down the Delaware river.

For readers who are not familiar with the concept of tubing (or the use of “tube” as a verb), it is what it sounds like: you get an inflatable tube, you sit in the tube, and you float down a river. See below:

A scene from a prior tubing excursion

It’s a very relaxing experience: once you’re in the tube, there’s really nothing to do except float, stare at the sky, and chat with your fellow tubers. It’s also a great way to take a break from screens, since—contrary to my husband’s belief (his phone fell into the river soon after the above photograph was taken)—iPhones are not waterproof.

But today’s post is not actually about tubing. No, it is about something that happened before we went tubing—during the pre-tube, if you will. We had opted against the DYI tube experience (which requires two cars, your own tubes, and more logistics than I felt ready to handle), and so we had gone to a local outfitter that rents tubes and then drives you and your compatriots (and your tubes) up-river for a few miles in a school bus before depositing you on the river bank so that you can tube back down.

Unfortunately, we just missed the 10am bus, and so we had to wait for the next one in an open-air shed with an amusement-park-esque line of other people, all clutching their giant tubes. It was hot, and when 10:35 rolled around with no bus in sight, people were getting cranky—in front of us was a mother with her pre-teen daughter, who was sitting in her tube on the ground, regularly complaining about how long the bus was taking; behind us was a five-person family, also displeased; my husband had gotten claustrophobic and had hopped out of the line to go stand by a tree.³

It was at this point that I looked down at my daughter, who had also decided to sit in her tube on the ground, and noticed that she was staring into space while patting her shoulders one by one, then her hips, then her head. Seeing her do this stirred something in me, some deep physical memory of a time long ago. I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to access it. Suddenly, the tubing line disappeared, replaced by a dance floor and a feeling of full-body awkwardness. I was suddenly at a bar mitzvah, or possibly a sweet 16.

“What are you doing?” I asked my daughter.

She responded without stopping to make eye contact. “The macarena.”

My first response was confusion: she is nine years old and, to the best of my knowledge, has not attended any parties involving line dances from the 1990s.

My second response was to try to join her.

Readers of a certain age, I invite you to try this yourself, right now, and see how it goes. You put your right hand out, palm down, then your left hand, palm down. Then you flip your palms up, one by one. And then . . .

What?

What do you touch next?

Is it your hips? Is it the side of your head?

I could not remember.

I tried singing the song to see if that might help. It came out something like, “Nuh, nunna, nuh, nunna do the macarena, nunna nuh, nunna nuh, nunna do the macarena. Nuh nunna nuh nunna nuh the macarena.” And then, with a hip swivel that I do remember (and I suspect you do as well),

“HEEEEYYYYY, MACARENA! AY!”

I tried asking my daughter for clarification on the intermediary steps—do I touch my head? My sides? My biceps near the elbows? What happens before the hip swivel?!

She was no help—whatever she proposed did not match my body’s memory of the macarena, which was coming to me in elusive flashes, like shadows dancing through leaves. My frustration about the late bus was gone; I needed to know how to dance the macarena, it needed to happen now, and my only source was proving herself to be entirely unreliable. Who could I ask? WHO COULD REMIND ME HOW TO DO THE MACARENA?

And then it occurred to me: I was flanked by middle-aged women.

I turned to the woman on my right, who had been doing her best to politely ignore us.

“Excuse me,” I said, “Do you remember how to do the macarena?”

To her great credit, she didn’t pretend to not know what I was talking about. Instead, she scrunched up her face for a second, trying to access her own seventh grade memory bank. Something flashed across her face, and she leaned her tube against a post.

“I think it’s like this.”

She started with the hand gestures, but then got tripped up around the same spot as me.

“Do you touch your sides now?”

“I don’t think so. . . that doesn’t feel right.”

I tried singing the song again, hoping that the music might help us tap into some suppressed physical memory. “Nuh nunna nuh nunna do the macarena. . . .”

I did my most convincing “Heeyyy, macarena! AY!” (complete with the 90-degree jump—anyone remember that part?). This resulted in me facing a different direction—the direction of the other middle-aged woman next to me in line.

“Do YOU remember how to do the macarena?” we asked her. (The first woman I’d asked had now joined me in my quest.)

The second woman scrunched up her face and tried doing the first steps, but the same thing happened: we could not remember the middle part.

This was turning into a disaster.

And then, dear readers, a miracle occurred: the grumpy pre-teen daughter, whom I had never even considered asking, leapt up out of her tube and announced, as if she were a knight on a white horse sweeping in to save us from ourselves:

“I know how to do the macarena.”

She said this with perfect pre-teen nonchalance, as if she spent the majority of her free time dancing the macarena—perhaps the electric slide, too, no big deal—and had been sitting around waiting for someone to ask her about it.

I turned to face her, joined by my two new middle-aged lady friends, one of whom was her mother. “You do? TEACH US!!”

And she did. She did teach us.

By now, the other people in the line were definitely paying attention to what was going on in our section—namely, five people (including my daughter, who had joined us), attempting to do the macarena in the middle of a bunch of oversized inner tubes.

At this point, I was still trying to sing the macarena, which was doing no one any favors, and so I was delighted when woman #2 reached into a plastic ziploc bag, took out her phone, and pulled up the Macarena on Spotify.

“Yes!” she said, as the song began to play. “Let’s DO this!”

And so we did. She cranked the volume as loud as it would go, and we danced the macarena while waiting for the tubing bus. My husband, still by the tree, told me later that he had looked over and seen what was going on and been very confused. (“I was like, is Catherine leading a dance?” To which one of my friends correctly responded, “That is the least surprising thing I have ever heard.”)

It was, objectively, completely absurd—and indeed, we were all cracking up. But the best part was that it wasn’t just the ladies in their 40s who were laughing: about thirty seconds in, woman #1 pointed at the formerly sullen pre-teen, who had a huge grin on her face, and said, “Look! She’s smiling now!”

Several minutes later, we were still dancing—hilariously, woman #2 had gotten so into the tube dance party that she had moved on to a different line dance (one of those songs that tells you what to do with your feet) and we were stepping to the left, to the left, to the right, to the right, when the school bus finally pulled up, after we’d been waiting for 45 minutes. And while I obviously was relieved to finally be getting on the bus so that I could fulfill my mission and sit in a tube while floating down the river, a part of me was a little disappointed: the party was just getting started.

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My point is . . .

There was no more dancing on the bus, but something else happened—which is ultimately the reason that I’m telling you this story.

We started talking with each other.

As we filed on to the retrofitted school bus, woman #2, energized by her recent experience of stepping to the left, to the left, struck up a conversation with woman #1, and they quickly determined they were both occupational therapists working in neighboring school districts. (She also asked me and woman #1 if we were sisters — why else had we possibly started doing the macarena together in a tubing line?) Then, as we sat on the bus together, squeezed so close that our legs were touching (and with a giant row of inner tubes in front of us) woman #1 began asking me about my family and telling me about her own, culminating in her sharing how emotional she felt about the fact that her son, three tubes down, was about to start college.

It was a sweet, unexpectedly poignant exchange, and all of it happened within the seven-minute ride. Then we got off the bus, hopped in our respective tubes and never saw each other again.

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In some senses, this might seem totally inconsequential. But instead, the spontaneous delight of publicly dancing with strangers at 10:35 on a random Wednesday morning—and then having a brief, slightly vulnerable conversation—was the highlight of my day, if not week. (It even beat out the fact that we saw three bald eagles!)

More specifically, I loved it for three reasons:

1. I loved the absurdity of it — the feeling of enlisting total strangers to do something so ridiculous was exhilarating and totally fit my definition of “fun” (it was a moment of playful, connected flow). The fact that I acted on my (perhaps odd) impulse to ask a stranger about the macarena ended up transforming a moment of drudgery (waiting for the bus) into a party.

2. Laughing and dancing together created an unexpected connection that lasted beyond the moment itself, and made us feel comfortable sharing details about our lives. It further cemented my belief that moments of fun don’t just feel good; they have the power to connect us.

3. It reminded me that most of us have something in common — and fun can help us find it. I have no idea what these women’s political beliefs are, or who they’re going to vote for this November. And it doesn’t matter. When we parted ways at the river, there was a genuine sense of warmth between us (no doubt brought on by the fact that we’d had a special, shared experience) — which would never have happened if we hadn’t danced together in line.

All told, the “macarena moment,” as my husband has started to call it, was an important reminder for me that opportunities for fun and connection are floating around us all the time, and that the more we notice and act on them, the happier and more connected we will feel. All it takes is a playful invitation—and someone who’s willing to say yes.

So this week, I encourage you to issue your own playful invitation. Strike up a conversation with a stranger. Create a delight for someone in your life. Do something slightly absurd—and invite someone to join you. Notice how you feel as a result.

To scrolling less and dancing more,

Catherine Price

PS: It’s palm down, palm down, palm up, palm up, bicep, bicep, head, head, front of hip, front of hip, side of hip, side of hip, HEEEYYYYYY MACARENA, OY!

PPS: Have you had a macarena moment of your own? Tell us about it in the comments!

PPPS: Thank you to everyone who became a paid subscriber after my last newsletter — I really appreciate it!

1. I’m not sure why I put that in quotation marks. I truly do want to live life as fully as possible.

2. This “no regrets” compulsion is definitely related to my constant awareness of my own mortality, but that’s a subject for a different post and/or therapy session.

3. This is the least surprising part of the entire story.