While Chris Penn learned to dance,
“Let’s Hear it for the Boy” inspired avalanches throughout the Rockies (you know there ain’t no mountains in Oklahoma); those sun-soaked, dance-deprived, small-town, god-fearing, tractor-chickening Rockies.

Sometime before or sometime after Chris Penn learned to dance
(Footloose timelines are anything but linear), in white, Wednesday, after-school shoes, Kevin Bacon danced a gymnast’s jig in what we dream was a poultry or hog or serial killer warehouse.

Before Chris Penn learned to dance,
Bomont was a dusty, Quiet-Riot-free environment filled with soda-loving Maries and Milos whose desperate shenanigans unfolded along infinitely-stretched, two-lane highways.

After Chris Penn learned to dance,
Bomont rebuilt itself as a Loggins-esque utopia dedicated to overcoming high rates of teen depression by prescribing herioc doses of The Carlton before it was so-branded and re-sold to the American public in 1990 by Bel-Air Danceaceuticals, Inc.

Though Chris Penn learned to dance, dance so hard, he danced so hard,
he couldn’t stop fighting even when the only thing he burned and yearned for was to dance into the heart of Sarah Jessica Parker and it was those fights, that fight, that drove her to marry Ferris Bueller (forever bound in hallucinatory matrimony deep within the crevasses of Cameron Frye’s anxious imaginations).

Still Chris Penn danced and danced and danced and danced
and so did John Lithgow and so did you and so did I and together we lost our blues in an Almost Paradise under a confetti-glitter moon, cut loose from every rule,
everybody cut,
everybody cut.