Little writing thing before the story. I just finished a three night class at the Smithsonian on Mental Calisthenics. It was co-taught by a researcher at the National Institute of Aging, the editor for the Newsday crossword puzzle and a member of the US Puzzle Team that played in the international championship for the past 4 years (he’s four years younger than me – nuts).

Anyway, it was all about increasing memory reserves and trying new puzzles to keep yourself sharp. The first day was dedicated to lateral thinking problems; the second day was all crosswords and yesterday was all non-word problems. The lateral thinking stuff I found particularly interesting as a writer and editor.

These puzzles are the one were you have an MC that gives you a situation and by asking the MC yes and no questions about the scenario you need to solve the puzzle. The key is to ignore all of your preconceived notions. So one problem would be “A man pushes his car up to a hotel and realizes he’s bankrupt.” You ask yes and no questions and it turns out that the man was playing monopoly. Another example would be “A man lives on the 13th floor of his apartment building. On rainy days he takes the elevator all the way up to the 13th floor. On the other days, he takes the elevator up to the 7th floor and the stairs up to the 13th.” You ask yes and no questions and it turns out the man is a midget that can’t reach the buttons past the seventh floor but on rainy days he uses his umbrella to hit it.

Anyway, I realized that these lateral thinking puzzles are a lot like plotting a story. A lot of the time we have a beginning and an end and we need to find a way to get there that makes sense. And in order to throw the reader off, we need to drop all of our preconceived notions and make the solution interesting and exciting instead of straight forward.

I started thinking up some of my own lateral puzzle problems (one of them led to a campy story about a vampire robbing a blood bank that I’m actually trying to find an angle on) and I realized that: 1) Everyone should do this. Try to come up with a fun ending and turn it into a puzzle, it’s a good pre-writing workout and 2) I think I might want to MC a weekly Mental Calisthenics thread somewhere in an effort to help aspiring writers and just sort of have some fun trying to stump people. I don’t know, could be fun. Just would need a place to host it.

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I remember when the lambada first started getting some serious press in NYC. There were all of these articles about “dirty dancing” and people practically having sex on the dance floor – the usual media hype.

One Friday my family was at Grandma’s house, like we were every Friday growing up, and they were all discussing the lambada. My family, being of Puerto Rican descent, couldn’t understand what was wrong with the traditional dances – the salsas and the merengues that already had an innocent but notable level of sexual connotation (truth is, it was the American bastardization of the lambada that made it more sexual than the Brazilian original).

Anyway, as we were discussing my Aunt Lisa jumps in and, being the youngest of my father’s siblings and quite hip, informs the rest of us that if we think the lambada is bad, we should see this reggae thing that’s hitting the clubs.

I couldn’t have been older than 12 at this point, the Lambada movie came out in 1990 and I know this was before that, so my familiarity with this “reggae thing” wouldn’t come for another two years at the age of 14, when all of us kids that frequented teen clubs learned how to dry hump on a crowded dance floor whenever they spun Cutty Ranks’ “Limb by Limb”.

Man – teenagers and reggae is not a healthy combination. It wasn’t even dancing or anything remotely close. It was a matter of how far you can shove your thigh up some girl’s crotch.

A good dancer was someone who was able to make the jeans obsolete, place the thigh bone securely between the labia* while still providing significant pressure to the clitoris.

A great dancer was one that can hump her leg at the same time and get your self some.

And Da Don Dada was one that did it while singing “Murder She Wrote” by Chaka Demus & Pliers**.

And, let me tell you, I was the Da Don Dada once. I don’t brag about my sex life, if anything I openly admit to the fact that I am awkward with my rare shining moment that is generally eclipsed by all of the embarrassing moments. But this one day on the dance floor will be one of the few sexual accomplishments I will brag about.

Because I got her off. And even if she was lying or just trying to be cool, it doesn’t matter to me, because the only evidence I have is that she went through the motions and said she came while dancing with me. Buju Banton’s Champion was on and I had that god-damn thigh wedged tight, angled just right, mixing up the motions on the clit and wham-o, like that she spat fire on my leg and I was indeed a Champion, somewhere in Jamaica an angel got its wings.

Age 14. The girl was talked about before. As mentioned, she said I was a good dancer. But in retrospect, I was Da Don Dada.

* Uh…If you’re not at work please do a google search on "ancient art of labia stretching" and please tell me what the fuck is up with that? What “tribes” partook in this “ancient art”? I gotta start using that. “No, honey, it’s the ancient art of money shots. It’s your roots.”

**Does anyone know have a copy of “Bam Bam”, the “Murder She Wrote” B-side? It’s not on Real Player On Demand and I’m jonesing.