Three strides right, three back left; you twirl together as the rose passes from her mouth to yours. Three more steps right and you carelessly fling the red rose behind you: it lands gracefully in a crystal vase. You dip her backwards, your effortless tango about to end in a passionate kiss.
Just then, the words “Don’t you think so?” interrupt your pleasant reverie. Searching for a suitable response you are left leaning stupidly against the wall, drink in hand, as you scramble to remember what she just said while you were daydreaming.
The reason you are standing there, dreaming instead of doing, is because, like nearly all members of our generation, you cannot dance; you never learned. Few of us are capable of anything more elegant than 70’s style boogies we learned from watching Pulp Fiction; only the best can even box-step. Instead of dancing, we get together and drink heavily until we are sufficiently smashed to grind with each other unabashedly. Not that this isn’t enjoyable, but it is merely a compromise between dancing and sex, and not half as fun as either.
My grandparents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in Mexico last fall, and, while their youngest friends may have been well over 40, those old bones know how to dance. Doing the salsa with your grandmother’s bridge partner on a dance-floor covered in WWII veterans can be much more fun than standing in place next to a cute girl, awkwardly shifting your feet to a beat that only you seem to hear. Even the chef came out after dinner and started tearing it up. Despite the high prevalence of arthritis among the guests, the party was a huge success because people were dancing.
Another occasion involved a wedding between a dynasty of Kentucky yokels and the Jersey-bred, Indiana-grown branch of my own clan. The Kentucky wedding this summer was complete with a bride who whipped out a requisite pack of Camel Lights out from under her wedding gown, heavy thunderstorms and a groom’s side filled with people who have never seen the surgeon general’s dental warning on a can of Skoal chewing tobacco. To top it off, the organizer was an obnoxious obese woman with a limp in her right leg who made sure to warn my family about the dangers of incest. But there was dancing.
I did the waltz, the two-step, a jig, a line-dance, the conga and the chicken dance. I danced with my mother, sister, aunts, cousins and even the groom’s mother for a very short time, (though by that hour she was more into the type of grinding that I described earlier, and I was put off both by the size of her husband and the distance between her two front teeth). My primary dance partner was one of the groom’s sisters, a cute girl in a pink dress, whose name I never did catch, or may have abruptly forgotten when she told me that she was only 13. After all, some fathers really do carry shotguns in the back of their pickups for just such an occasion.
Fortunately this was a late development because, both unable to overcome my fear of buckshot and to enter the dance-floor without being grabbed by the aforementioned pre-teen, I could no longer dance, and the evening became dull quickly. I had to hang out with my high school-aged cousin and his friends, who, like all teens, had been afraid of being awkward and were the only people not dancing. They were having absolutely the least fun. They couldn’t even drink, this being a room full of devout Baptists.
In short, don’t go to Kentucky unless you bring your smokes and forget your retainer, and dancing is always more fun than not dancing. It is a whole form of self-expression that people our age have missed out on; it has become a source of stress instead of fun.
Take a cue from Napoleon, and go learn some dance moves. Few things are as romantic as the waltz or as fun as the quick two-step or line dance, with the exception of couple’s skydiving, and even then you’ll see that there is a fair amount of spinning involved for both parties.
