Wit & Attitude Quote by Michelle Shocked

There’s a sly bait-and-switch in Michelle Shocked’s line: she opens with the wholesome image of a grandmother running a dance school, then immediately undercuts it with personal abstention. That pivot sets up the real punchline - not about dance technique, but about cultural permission. In a faith tradition popularly coded as disciplined and abstinent, Shocked frames dancing as the sanctioned outlet, the loophole where the body gets to speak.

Calling Mormons “dancing fools” sounds teasing, even affectionate, but it’s also a sharp little ethnography. The joke depends on the stereotype of Mormon restraint: no alcohol, no smoking, no coffee, a careful choreography of behavior. When she labels dancing “the only vice they have,” she collapses the moral hierarchy between “sin” and “fun” and exposes how communities often need a pressure valve. The humor works because it treats something innocent as if it were illicit, which reveals how moral cultures can eroticize or intensify the very pleasures they permit.

There’s personal subtext, too: she didn’t study at her grandmother’s school, yet she grew up surrounded by dance as social currency - communal, performative, embodied. For a musician, that’s not incidental. It’s a backdoor origin story about rhythm, movement, and the way art often begins as a negotiated rebellion: not breaking the rules outright, but finding the one sanctioned space where you can still feel a little dangerous.