blog1220

We Should Be Dancing

Dancing has always been as entwined in our existence and as necessary as eating or sleeping or sex.

When I was 11 years-old and was forced to slow dance at my cousin’s bar mitzvah to Elvis’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” me with my little clip-on tie and she with her chiffon dress, it was at arm’s distance, one hand on the young girl’s shoulder, the other holding her hand, keeping sure that we get no closer than that because I was just not interested, yet, as we swayed to the music trying hard not to step on each other’s feet.

And then I got a little older and was growing more interested in the fair sex and it was a party in Alan Feinstein’s basement and the boys wore button down white shirts with skinny black ties and girls in knee-length plaid jumpers and by that time slow dancing had evolved and Peggy March would be singing “I Will Follow Him” as I put my arm around her waist, held her hand with my elbow crooked and our bodies touched and hopefully, I would feel her small but developing breasts against my chest and maybe even let my hand wander from her waist to her rear, although that was really way beyond hope as it was nothing less than the Holy Grail.

And that was pretty much where slow dancing stalled for quite a few years until it evolved not so much into a dance but into a straight out kind of foreplay with arms around each other and no longer a need to intertwine our fingers and hands and we’d grind in not subtle ways to “Crimson and Clover” by Tommy James and the Shondells and my hands and hers would migrate downward until the music ended and along with that, any hopes of the dance leading to something more. If during a slow dance, somebody turned the lights out at the party, things could get really good but just like that the lights went back on and the foreplay, as it was, was over for now.

Then came the mid- to late 1960s when dancing became diversified and couples were distant with curious dances like the Monkey, the Twist, the Shimmy, the Shake, the Freddy, the Loco-Motion, the Mashed Potato, the Frug and the Watusi. The girls in white boots and mini-skirts danced in cages, rather chauvinistic I would say, on TV shows like Shindig, doing the variations of the dances of the day. Otherwise, dancing was really just jumping around to a beat, with the music blasting away any possibility of communication, often with eyes closed and rarely coming closer than a foot or so from a partner to songs that had long lost their innocence like the LSD infused “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane or the equally drug prompted “Incense and Peppermint” by a group with the nonsensical name, “The Strawberry Alarm Clock.” Things were groovy, or maybe far out or maybe even mellow and if things weren’t working out, a bummer.

And then people were done with the protest years and along came good vibes, groovy, funky, jive, foxy and lame disco and forgettable but hugely popular tunes like “Disco Inferno” by the group of the same name, “Love Train” by the O’Jays and bigly speaking, KC and the Sunshine Band with numerous chartbusters like the poetry-challenged “Get Down Tonight,” the subtle “That’s the Way (I Like It)” and the booty topping tune, “Shake Your Booty.”

The guys wore really ugly platform shoes, offensive paisley shirts with huge collars open to a few inches above the belly button, which were positively abhorrent for someone with a larger stomach and maybe the worst fashion moment of them all, white, low-riding bellbottom pants with white plastic belts. The girls fashions were no better with multi-color pant suits, maybe hot pants, which were fine on the right type body but deadly otherwise, along with very big platform shoes that made the woman preternaturally tall, much taller than I would ever be even with my platform shoes on. And forget about touching, disco was for gyrating with partners like islands, never touching or even making eye contact.

And now we get to the age of COVID-19, the year the dancing died, along with any close physical contact with anyone other than family and physicians and neither is optimum for new, sexual relationships. Sad it is for the young people who can’t get a good squeeze or for the older people, or for that matter, for anyone who has had to forego that most necessary of all human instincts, physical contact. It will no doubt one day be over and there will be new music and new dancing and who knows, maybe a return and retreading of disco. We can only hope and we can call it MADA, Make America Disco Again.