THE SOUL OF A DANCER
By Rose Gomez

     Whether this qualifies as an actual possession or not, I will leave to the reader to decide. The following occurred around 1966 or so when I was about sixteen years old. One evening, a bunch of us were over at a friend's house playing pool in her basement recreation room. I wasn't very good at it and stopped playing. I was reading some magazines when I became bored and started to dance a little to the radio while I watched my friends play pool.
     The basement recreation room was tremendous as this was a rather large, ranch-style house. After awhile, I danced to the farthest end of the room and started to dance around by myself in the darkened end of the room while my friends continued to play over on the lighted end.
     I grabbed an old pool cue and danced with it as I was really bored. The more I danced, the more I seemed to reach a sort of meditative state. Soon, I couldn't even hear the radio or anything else. I danced to the music in my head though I don't remember now what that music was. I danced over to the pool table using the pool cue as a kind of spear. I felt very calm and very aware of what I was doing, yet at the same time, I felt that I was far away from where I was. As much as I felt calm, almost sleepy, my motions did not seem my own. My friends stopped playing and watched me as I danced around the pool table three times with my pool cue/spear in my hand, using it as part of the dance. After dancing three times around the table, I took the pool cue and put every ball in a pocket, one right after the other (remember, I was a lousy player). It was then that I "woke up" from my little trance, fully cognizant of what I'd just done, but unable to stop myself from doing it at the time.
     My friends told me that my little dance had been somewhat incredible. They'd never seen me dance like that before and didn't think that anyone, except someone who had been trained to do so, could dance that way. One friend, who had been to the last World's Fair , told me that I danced like the African dancers at the African pavilion (maybe they were Masai or Watusi, she couldn't remember the tribe). My friends said that my eyes were glazed over as I danced.
     I tried to reproduce the dance again, but couldn't. The dance, to try to furnish a description, had been kind of "sinuous" and slow, with my head thrown back at times and my spine undulating lengthwise while I performed in a circle. Although I didn't feel entirely in control of my motions at the time, I still felt that had I been "coerced" into doing something wrong, I could have resisted easily. I kind of enjoyed that little dance and what a work out!
     It never happened to me again and all attempts on my part to dance that way again, failed. I've  still never been a good pool player either.

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