A Land of Happy Feet

A Land of Happy Feet

It all started with an online video of men in prison suits, dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Because dancing inmates are more charming than rioting convicts or the damned in death row, the clip’s first fans told their family and friends about it, who then passed the word to their tenth-degree relatives and friends. And then CNN et.al learned about the dance class at the CPDRC and turned the inmates into bigger YouTube stars. As of today, the original clip has 44,749,112 hits. Not bad when your other option of passing time is drawing a fresh line on the wall at each sunset until it is full of lines.

After that, dancing traffic enforcers and a cosmetic surgeon and a starlet cavorting to “Careless Whisper” reminded Filipinos of their dancing heritage.

Cebu Pacific came up with the bright idea, after observing that airline passengers are at their drowsiest during the in-flight safety demonstration, of tweaking a lifeless but vital flight procedure. No, it’s not about fighting off a bunch of religious zealots who want to turn a harmless sky bus into a missile. It’s about learning what to do in the event of an emergency such as strapping your bulging tummy securely to your seat and reciting every prayer that you know and did not care to learn until that moment of clarity when your plane is dropping from 30,000 feet to 20,000, then to 10,000, and lower still until you can clearl see trees. So, Cebu Pacific taught its prettiest flight attendants to dance to Lady Gaga and Kate Perry and sent them out to the aisle to dance while teaching the passengers about the life vests, exits, and yes, a few dancing moves. The exercise was fun. Too bad there was not a pole in the aisle.

What did we learn aside from discovering that when you are female, 5 feet 6 inches tall, and weighing about 120 pounds, you can dance in the aisle of an airplane? We, Filipinos, have happy feet. Now, if we can only break our obsession with beauty pageants and vocal cord-busting singing contests, maybe we can beat the Cebu Dancing Inmates. Not in the length of prison terms I hope, but in synchronized dancing of close to a hundred million Filipinos - flight attendants, traffice enforcers, randy cosmetic surgeon, movie vixen, everyone.

- Prospero E. Pulma Jr.