taking risks and liberated

This premature-coming out was due to my confusing childhood experiences, and fears accrued and fed during my teenage years. I questioned the origin of my deviant desires, and  I expected my family to disown me if I ever made these attractions known.  I was muddling through a lot of murky emotions.  I moved to Santa Cruz in 2000 and was still in the early stages of  disentanglement  from my family.  I had just turned 21, and was learning how to sustain living on my own, in one of the most expensive areas in the country.  I realized that if  wanted to make it in this town, I needed to supplement my income.  Kim suggested I go audition at the club.  I have no idea what gave me the courage to do it, other than the severity and depth of my lunacy, was significantly below my radar. The auditions took place during regular business hours and were advertised as amateur night.   That evening, I would dance to atop that very same stage, I was sitting at just a week earlier.  In preparation,  I must have tossed my feminist roots, my pants, and any sense of modesty right out the window, because the song I chose to dance to was, Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up. I don't know what I was thinking.  But I remember feeling pretty confident.   Even back then I could throw caution to the wind.  Yet, on many different levels, I was still so naive and innocent.  Coming from an extremely conservative, Italian-Catholic family from the mid-west, I have always described myself as the blackest, black sheep in my family, for at least three generations.  I can’t explain where my imprudent willingness to take risks came from.  Its as much a part me, as my love for spaghetti.  

When my music started, I got up on stage and the adrenaline kicked in.  Im sure I looked excruciatingly awkward, but guys were throwing money up on stage and the music transmitted my consciousness to alternate dimension. As I moved about the stage, my dominant senses blurred.  My body was on auto-pilot and I  surrendered  myself to its free-flowing movement.  I felt liberated.  I made $40 in 4 minutes.  That seemed worth it and I thought it was fun.  The club was owned by a couple of Eastern European brothers, and they regretfully informed me that I had not been hired.  I don't think I saw Kim again after that.  It turned out, she had boyfriend and I was not on the market for being a third wheel.   I decided that I would look for work locally.  And that’s when I met Jim.