Are You Still Blushing From Last Night? I Am

I've written about hands before, how I think you can tell what instrument someone plays by the way he or she holds his or her hands. (Really, is it so wrong to use their here?) My former cello teacher has the most celloie looking hands you've ever seen. Anyway, I noticed in grad school that most of the poets I know use a kind of staid circular motion while talking with their hands. Their palms tend to point to themselves and their hands sort of balloon around them. Almost all of the painters I know hand-talk in squares, as though everything were some sort of canvas. Up and wide, space, light these hands say.

Well, at last night's reading, I met two women who are modern dancers. Their hands spoke in swirls and swoops. I don't think the women knew each other, but they reached far and wide with their hands, somehow encompassing their whole bodies--hands as hips when the hips are sitting. I wanted both of them to invite me to their performances, but they didn't. I guess I'm happy enough just watching them talk.