Somehow spent hoursthis weekend at Boujis, a well-heeled London club. It has been a long while since this boy mingled with nightlife athletes.

Here's a failed opening line from my first night: "You look like Edie Sedgwick."

And she did! Vintage pink sleeveless top, long pearl strings, short white tennis skirt. I could have said Edie Sedgwick meets Pat Benatar, but her long full brown hair projected more East Coast tradition than love is a battlefield.

But love is a battlefield, and I made a false charge. This girl registered nothing but diffidence and ignorance. Projecting a glamorous ghost onto someone fails when they don't recognize the name. 19 years old, I couldn't tell. I took a chance!

I'm too invested in being interesting to have much success here, I decided. "You've got to lower your intellectual standards and raise your physical standards" a friend advises me. And she might be right, for this environment.

Meeting strangers, even in meeting-friendly circumstances, involves inserting yourself in their space somehow. Attracting attention to yourself. I often meet strangers by sharing a casual observation. But at a dance club, the music is too loud to strip out all but the most essential grunts and thrusts.

I try thinking it's good exercise for me to practice getting outside my head, experiencing dancing and drinking and yelling in people's ears. Then I think about how hard these people work to battle boredom - money, drink, drugs, fashion, deafening music, all thrown down the throat. Why try so hard? I have a job I like, I tell myself, I don't need to party hard on the weekends; radically, manically stimulate myself.

Night two, slightly more accustomed to the scene I decided to amplify my energy by removing clothing. I stripped down shirtless beneath my red vest and wore an unbuttoned tuxedo shirt over that. Dancing naked = liberation.

I wasn't forty-five seconds from having changed clothes before a beautiful spastic girl grabbed me and we danced for five hours. We danced until the club closed, and we danced after the music stopped, chanting and prancing, laughing and giggling. She was a tomfooler.

She took me home with her friends, I hung out with 20-23 yrs Londoners. She turned on music in the living room and we continued dancing as her friends passed out or crept away. Dancing until sunrise, and a bit thereafter. How manic! How perfect!

This old dance curmudgeon was just looking for a energetic playmate.