Opinion: Perhaps it all comes down to dancing

Originally published July 13, 2004.

You may not have noticed this, but I have: In commercials for products that are supposed to help you feel better, you quite often see people dancing after they have taken the product.

For example, if they take a pill to increase their virility, you see them dancing afterward. The implication is that the pill makes you want to dance.

The people I have talked to who take this particular pill tell me dancing is not what is on their minds. In fact, they say, dancing is about the furthest thing from their minds, which is why they got a prescription for the pill in the first place. Also, I am told, an urge to dance is not listed among the occasional side effects of this drug, side effects which can include heart attacks, strokes, and acute embarrassment, which for some of us could be the worst.

Then we see the ads for painkillers for people who have arthritis. As soon as these folks take the wonder drugs, we see them — you guessed it — dancing. And when they aren’t dancing, they are out beside a cliff somewhere (probably near San Francisco) doing tai chi or, in a park playing touch football with their grandkids.

(I don’t understand how they found grandkids willing to play touch football with their grandparents. Most grandkids would just as soon have you give them money and leave them be.)

Maybe these pill commercials are trying to say that the pills don’t really do what they’re supposed to do, but they do make you want to dance like a maniac.

If that were true, I might try some, because I’ve never been much of a dancer and I would like to be better.