The zombie apocalypse: Coming soon to a flash mob near you

I may have the dubious honor of being the only person in “Thriller” history to suffer an injury during the overhead clapping portion of the dance. That’s right: my hands are bruised from overzealous smacking. But I guess injury should be expected when one repeatedly performs any action for two hours straight.

I’ve wanted to learn the moves to the iconic 1983 Michael Jackson music video ever since my sister’s classmate, Katie Boyle, so flawlessly performed the dance during their high school graduation party; I too was on the dance floor when the werewolves began howling and the doors began creaking over the DJ’s sound system. But Katie was the only occupant of the room who knew the steps, and we all watched her, mesmerized. Oh how I wanted to shimmy and shake too!

Flash forward 10 years to my bachelorette party: My younger sister and I are on a Bahamas-bound cruise, both of us attempting to learn the moves over the course of an hour-long tutorial. Tipsy on mouthwash-flavored light rum (Note: Be sure to thoroughly rinse the Scope bottle before replacing the contents with food coloring-laced liquor), we retain very little of what we learned.

Hailey, it seems, can’t even recall the name of dance; she referred to it as “The Monster Mash” in a recent Facebook message reminiscing about those joyous green tongue days.

“That was ‘Thriller,’ you dimwit!” I corrected her.

“Oh yeah!” she wrote. “I couldn't remember the name of it. Monster Mash/Thriller, same thing pretty much!”

The horror.

With Halloween fast approaching, I figured now was the time to finally commit the moves to memory. A quick Google search revealed the BayArea Flash Mob’s calendar listing for two “Thriller” dance lessons in downtown San Francisco.

“The Bay Area Flash Mob gets many requests for ‘Thriller’ during Halloween season. Haunted houses, museums, nightclubs, you name it, we’ve danced it!” according to the listing. “We want to make sure all you flash mob lovin’ zombies know the dance and are ready to execute it (get it?) at any moment.”

Wait. I suddenly realize my readers may not know what a “flash mob” is.

Mom, Dad: A flash mob consists of a large group of people who assemble in a public place and, to the delighted surprise of onlookers, spontaneously break into a dance choreographed to a song broadcast over a sound system.

Flash mobs have been a “thing” since 2003, but I didn’t know of them until 2010, when I watched the season two “Modern Family” episode, “Manny Get Your Gun.” During the episode, Mitchell surprises Cameron by joining a flash mob performing En Vogue’s “Free Your Mind” at a shopping mall. But instead of expressing the customary delight, Cameron feels left out.

“You cheated on me with choreography, and that is the worst kind,” Cameron tells his partner.

To ensure my partner didn’t devolve into sour puss-hood, I invited him along to Sunday’s “Thriller” session, the first of two classes on the path to official flash mob certification. Surprisingly, he agreed to go.

Levy Dance Studio was tucked into a narrow SoMa alley, and Matt and I would have overlooked the garage door entrance had not more than 100 people been loitering outside on the pigeon-poop strewn sidewalk. They wore the rough-and-tumble expressions of “West Side Story” gangs ready to rumble, and I felt strangely subversive standing among them, as if we were all assembled for an underground meeting to plan a shake up of the populace through synchronized dance.

Matt seemed to be the only student outfitted in khakis, a polo and Converse sneakers for two hours of spastic shimmying and crotch grabbing. With 100 bodies about to be crammed into an air conditioning-deprived room, he would soon pay for the wardrobe miscalculation with sweat.

From the exuberant clapping and hooting that accompanied his introduction, I gathered Julien, the instructor, is some kind of “Thriller” expert. Blond, skinny and unmistakably French, Julien referred to the song as “Triller,” an adorable mispronunciation the female half of the room naturally found quite endearing. He’s a tenured professor of zombie behavior and likely hails from a top Parisian dance conservatory’s Michael Jackson “Bust a Move” Department.

But even Julien, in all his “Triller” wisdom, was no match for Hugh, a member of the class who gradually took center stage. The Gumby-like youth, it seems, is a “Thriller” demigod, a conduit between the Great Michael, lord of dance, and mere pelvic thrusting novices. Hugh, you see, has had instruction from the zombies who appeared in the original music video.

“Pretend you’re carrying a barrel,” Hugh advised during the jittery “advance” portion of the routine.

Hugh was lithe, limber and flawlessly smooth; each of his observations and tips was met with uproarious applause from the students and gratitude from the good-natured Julien.

Turns out, my favorite “Thriller” dance step is zombie stomping – probably because it requires little coordination and happens to be the first move in the routine.

When it comes to choreographed dance routines, Matt and I both display signs of early-onset Alzheimer’s; we can’t recall a damn thing. This uncanny forgetfulness is only exasperated by the presence of other dancers, who undoubtedly judge us and deem us unworthy of personhood. So we positioned ourselves in the far back corner of the studio, where Julien and Hugh were less likely to notice when we swung our hips left instead of right or, perhaps, crashed into the utility sink. Our preparations were foiled, however, when Julien began swapping the order of the lines “so that everyone had a chance at the front.”

Matt and I’s “front” was the meeting point of two mirrored walls. All the other zombies could clearly see us from that position and, sensing our weakness, they continued to advance until we were trapped in the corner.

“Please,” I cooed to another couple. “Take the front position. We don’t mind.”

With the two of them in front, we could follow their lead or, if they screwed up, judge them.

Despite our profuse sweating, claustrophobia, bumbling movements, and bruised appendages, Matt and I had a most enlightening time. The simultaneous stomping of 200 feet upon a wood floor is truly a wondrous sound. I wonder if passersby could hear us and, if so, whether they feared a zombie apocalypse was underway. I can only guess what the neighbors must have thought when they caught sight of Matt and I practicing last night, our silhouettes marching back and forth in front of the living room window.