Put On Your Red Shoes and Dance the Blues.

"You are to keep your gliding motion, no dancer will be able to move as gracefully as you, but at every step it will feel as if you were treading on a sharp-edged knife, so sharp that your feet will seem to be bleeding." —Hans Christian Andersen, "The Little Mermaid"

January. The Christmas tree is out on the sidewalk. The boxes are put away. The light through the windows, when you finally wake up, is dim at best. The old convertible's windshield is frozen over—from the inside. The new Twitter feed has only three blessed followers, yet somehow the ad algorithms already know it's the right target for the sponsored tweet from Probiotic America about stomach problems.

On Saturday, while I was dragging myself through the day and getting some provisions at the grocery store, this song came on.



It lit me up. "I forgot about this song," I said to myself, lip-syncing shamelessly through the aisles of the store. No idea, like most people, that he was sick. Just enjoyed the moment.

It's possible there were more classic, "better" David Bowie songs. But 1980s singles Bowie is the Bowie for me. "Blue Jean," "Let's Dance," "Modern Love," and "China Girl." With a dollop of later-discovered, earlier-recorded Dick Cavett flavor.



By Monday, David Bowie's technicolor, stoic, enviably cool approach to sorrow permeated everything, because he'd died, and the world was still human enough to respond.

Sir UncMo went to the track below. (Well actually, the a cappella version.) It happens to be the song he sang at karaoke the night we met, but that's not why he played it. He played it because it was as perfect a way as any to note how time doesn't give a fuck when it comes to staggering talent.