Alarm

I give regular tours at a contemporary art museum. One day when I enter the museum, I hear the dreadful sound of a car alarm coming from a back gallery. It sound like the classic one that came out twenty years ago or so.  You would recognize it instantly: a screeching sound track alternates every 60 seconds or so, from European ambulance siren sounds (no doubt taken from World War II movies that featured Nazis hunting Anne Frank), to the deafening beeps of a truck backing up, to a loud computerized electronic stutter. My innards clench as my mind begins a litany of negativity: I hate that damn noise. How could those people (car owners/alarm companies) be so cruel as to torture the public like this? These horrible things must be in violation of city decibel ordinances; their creators belong in jail.

Thus I enter the back gallery with my mouth puckered in disapproval, my jaws grinding in a way that will cause repercussions with my TMJ dentist. That’s when I see the video that accompanies the cacophony.

On the video screen, a modern dancer has choreographed her own personal party moves using the car alarm as a score. With joyful abandon, she does a 1960s rock and roll classic, pumping her arms up and down like pistons and swaying her hips to the Nazi ambulance sounds. With the piercing truck-backing-up blasts, she kicks her legs up and adds a swimmer’s back-stroke with her arms. To the computerized electronic stammers, she dances a robot-style Charleston.

A big smile replaces my Calvinist judgments.

My urban condo faces a large parking lot. Inevitably, those old car alarms still occasionally detonate. But every time, I laugh, remembering the exuberant dance.  And, if no one is watching, my arms and legs twitch with a little robotic Charleston of my own.


Cate Burns is the author of Libido Tsunami: Awash with the Droll in Life, in which she unearths the ludicrous in the emotional live traps surrounding us — in families, friends and disastrous romances. A version of this story appears in this book. Love it? Get it on Amazon today.