LETTING ZORBA TEACH YOU TO DANCE

Have you ever heard of the poet Charles Bukowski? Well, I haven't either. But he makes a good point when he wrote his editor: "Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must live."

Which is, I believe, the very lesson the straight-laced Englishman learns from the wonderfully crazy Zorba The Greek in the 1964 movie of the same name. The Englishman lives by the cool and proper rules of society; Zorba knows no rules except those that pour out of his heart like hot lava. The Englishman co-exists with raw nature; Zorba virtually has sex with nature. The Englishman is cerebral and contained; Zorba is emotional and knows how to dance at the whim of a wish.

By all the rules, Zorba -- played pitch-pefect by Anthony Quinn -- is a foul-mouthed, foul-smelling brute of a man. And yet we are immediately sucked into his glorious primitiveness. He loves the land, the sky, the drink, the food, and especially the women of his Island paradise. It's the kind of unbridled, un-orthodox, un-disciplined, un-educated love the well-bred Englishman cannot possibly understand.

And yet...

While he watches Zorba break and make rules as he travels his day, the proper young man realizes that you can't really live life in a gilded cage. Everything he has learned -- from books, from schools, from society -- seem so reedy and brittle here in the blazing Mediterranean sun. Life is not something you study. It is everything you feel. And not year to year, but moment to moment.

The final scene -- after all of Zorba's good but uncouth intentions have collapsed -- allows this un-lettered bear of a man two choices. Either cry over the tragedy of life. Or dance at the ecstasy of life. But dance to what? To nothing more than the beat of his beating heart.

I don't know if God is Geek, but on that island on that day, I'm convinced He was. And He smiled down to whisper to His groaning world -- yes, children, dance. Dance whenever, wherever and however you can. For this is what you will be invited to do here with us....