During all of this upheaval and resettling, I went back to swing dancing.
I had missed it.
I had missed me.

When I was dancing I felt most myself—before I learned to apologize for taking up space. On the dance floor, joy was not suspicious. Joy was the point. You showed up, you spun, you laughed when you messed up, and no one asked if it was appropriate.

To celebrate my triumphant return to the dance floor, I went shopping.

For dresses.

Ah yes. The dress. My old friend.

Dresses and I had a complicated history. As a kid I loved dresses, the pinker, the poofier, the better. A promise of a new dress was enough to get me to do just about anything, like join a cult.

And then… the sad dresses.

Mission dresses that were practical in the way cardboard is practical. Dresses designed to erase a body, to suggest I was merely a hanger for obedience. Dresses that said, Don’t look, don’t notice, don’t want. Dresses that survived on polyester and guilt. Polyester so thick it could withstand a testimony.

And the wedding dress. The dress that was supposed to contain joy but somehow didn’t. A dress that looked right in pictures and wrong in my bones. A dress I wore because I was supposed to want it. A dress that taught me, briefly and disastrously, that you could be dressed like a bride and still feel completely absent from your own life.

Somewhere along the way, dresses stopped being about delight and became about duty.

But standing in my kitchen, newly divorced, newly unmoored, newly remembering how to triple-step, something in me stirred. I remembered there had once been good dresses. Dresses that didn’t apologize. Dresses that moved when I moved. Dresses that understood centrifugal force.

There were dresses that twirled.
Dresses that flattered my shape instead of hiding it.
Dresses that said, Yes, this body is here on purpose.

Dresses that I needed.

I found a site. Pin Up Girl Clothing. Vintage couture. Bombshell silhouettes. The kind of dresses that assume you are going somewhere interesting, even if that somewhere is just the dance floor of a community center with questionable air conditioning.

I became a little bit obsessed.

Okay—more than a little.

I filled my closet the way I was refilling myself. Color came back first. Then curves. Then confidence. Every zipper felt like reclamation. Every skirt that flared when I spun felt like a small but decisive rebellion.

Every plunging neckline a declaration of independence.

Possibly treason.

These dresses were not for church.
They were not for saving souls.
They were for dancing. For laughing. For being seen.

I became a regular at the BYU swing dances, and the Provo swing dances, and was introduced to a new kind of dance – the saucier cousin to swing. BLUES dancing. It had a lot of the same steps, but performed with a different energy. Like….swing at 2 AM, after you had a few too many drinks. Instead of bouncing, blues was more grounded, sensual, focused on connection. It was a revelation.

Another revelation was house parties. Now that people started to know me, I started getting invited.

Some of the people in the dance community were blessed to live in a home with at least some open space, wood flooring, a sound system (which sometimes was just an iPod connected to a speaker), Because we were rich in rhythm, not money.

Dancers would gather at their home and dance until the wee hours of the morning.

I remember driving up to Salt Lake to go to a house party, and discovering that Leah, the girl hosting it, was a beautician. And I started driving up to her house parties early to get my haircut. And we became good friends. One of my first new friendships.

Of course, being socially awkward I continued to use my coping mechanism of over-the-top flirting to talk to people.

By the way, you still look gorgeous. Grrrr.

Thankfully, no one took me seriously.

I danced in a lot of small, hot, dark spaces all over Utah Valley. It was amazing.

But at the same time I was SO thankful my home had carpeted floors so I didn’t have to have all those people at my house.

One day, at a dance at BYU I was chatting with Seth – the same fedora wearing Seth, whose too comfortable seating had put me to sleep and sent my day into spiral right before my return to Ricks all those years ago. And he invited me to a pizza party at his place.

I was becoming a downright social butterfly.

When I arrived at his little apartment in Provo there were maybe eight people there, no one I knew. A couple Papa John’s pizzas on the counter. The Life Aquatic playing on a little TV. People lounging on mismatched couches and floor pillows. It felt casual, cozy, safe.

Then someone produced alcohol.
Boone’s. Southern Comfort. Fireball.

At the time, I thought this was hardcore.

All the other parties I had recently been to had only served water.

My Mormon alarm bells screamed in my skull.

CALM DOWN, DIANA. BE COOL.

This had never worked before. But, somehow, I was. I was proud of myself. Look at me, around sinners, and not immediately bursting into flames. A personal best.

Things were going great until one man — someone I’d never met — stood up, pointed at me, and announced:

“You’re hot. I’m going to take off my clothes and wait for you. Don’t be long.”

Then he walked into the bedroom and shut the door.

Bold choice.

I giggled nervously, because apparently that’s my emergency response. A couple of people laughed. Everyone went back to their pizza.

Ten minutes later the bedroom door opened, and out he came — naked except for a blanket he had wrapped around his waist like an oversized towel.

“Are you coming or not?” he asked.

This time everyone noticed.
Laughing. Catcalls. Teasing.
At this point, I realized I was no longer a guest. I was the entertainment.

No cover charge.

I shook my head, mortified, trying to communicate with my eyes that I had not ordered this upgrade. But the group, delighted by my discomfort, gathered around me and lifted me off the couch.

Which is how I learned that when you ask for a combination with extra sausage, you need to be very specific.

They carried me into the bedroom and tossed me onto the giant California King bed. Then they all piled on, laughing.

For one brief, shining second, I thought:
Oh good.
They’re diffusing the situation.

Strength in numbers.

Then they started kissing.

Hands everywhere. Shirts coming off. Buttons undone.

No. No, this was not an intervention. This was… enthusiasm.

I froze. Absolutely still. Watching a nightmare assemble itself around me.

When two girls started unbuttoning my top, survival finally kicked in. I bolted to the bathroom, slammed the door, locked it, and collapsed to the floor, hyperventilating.

A few minutes later came a soft knock.

“Diana? Can I come in?”

It was Seth.

I unlocked the door enough for him to slip inside, then locked it again.

“I’m sorry,” he said — angrily. Apparently, I had “ruined the mood.”

He sat with me until my breathing slowed. When I finally came out, everyone was clothed and sulking. I put on my shoes, my jacket, and left.

Weeks later, I got a call from an unknown number.

“Hey, Diana, this is… uh… from Seth’s party? Yeah, so, turns out one of the girls tested positive for chlamydia. You’ll need to get tested.”

“Oh,” I said. “Um, I didn’t stay. But thanks.”

Turns out I didn’t ruin the mood after all.

Years later, I tell this story to friends, people who actually know what they’re doing, and the moment that horrifies them most isn’t the ambush.

Or the nudity.
Or the chlamydia phone tree.

It’s the pizza.

“Pizza?” they whisper, like I’ve described a war crime.

“No one who knows what they’re doing serves pizza before an orgy.”

Which honestly tells you everything you need to know about that night.

I learned to be a little more careful about which invitations I accepted after that.

These days, if there’s pizza, I ask follow-ups.