What Dance Style Represented the Baby Boomer Generation

Letter From Mobile

Dancing Across the Generations

• 53

• Dec. 31, 2013

On a September night this year in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, my married woman and I, visiting New York from Alabama, caput to a bar and eating place where our daughter is celebrating her 26th birthday. As the evening unfolds and Meredith'south friends pack the place, the music gets louder, with a D.J. favoring Afro-Cuban music laying down a catchy beat.

There is eating, drinking, moving about to the pulse, but the little trip the light fantastic toe floor remains empty. The volume grows.

Virtually midnight, Nancy and I pause the ice, rocking and twirling in a mix of jitterbug and salsa. The party crowd gets thicker. Our steps get lighter. Only one twenty-something couple joins usa on the flooring. As others look on, I know what they must be thinking of u.s.: these parents, in their 28th year of wedlock, are still vital, cool.

Past one a.m. we are ready to depart, and Meredith'south friends, their night still fresh, tell us how much they enjoyed meeting us.

"And we loved watching you ii dance," one immature adult female says. "You were so beautiful."

Cute? I feel dated, quaint, a visitor from a planet of long ago.

* * *

For every bit long every bit I can think, nosotros have danced. My parents began their romance at a trip the light fantastic toe in Mobile, Ala., and raised me and my three older sisters in a dwelling house where the right song on a scratchy Victrola was enough to fix off a two-step or rumba.

Information technology's the last night of 1986, and the band at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, Ala., across the bay from Mobile, is playing "Wing Me to the Moon." I'grand 33, and dancing with my mom. She is lite in my arms, following, with patient ease, my clumsy foxtrot. Alongside us, as the clock winds toward midnight, Dad sends my Nancy into a slow plow, bringing her back more smoothly than I ever could.

We look out to Mobile Bay, a slender moon in the New year's Eve sky. The night is dank, but in hither the dance orchestra is cooking.

A new tune begins – a peppy "Bye, Bye, Blackbird" – and my mother and I start in. I'thou rusty, not certain of my steps, but 8th-form cotillion preparation from 1967 is nevertheless in my blood.

My mom guides me in an easy swing, leading me by deftly following. As she rocks back and I pull her close again she is beaming, exclaiming, "You've got information technology now." Then my father is borer me on the shoulder, cutting back in.

Nancy and I, in our 2nd year of marriage, brainstorm a Cajun step we learned in New Orleans. I look at her, tall and blonde, moving with ease, and so over at my parents. In their seventies, their quick pace turns back the hands of the clock. I encounter them not as cute, only stylish, the embodiment of charm. The dance floor burnishes their aureola.

They are gone now, simply not their dancing.

* * *

It was my big sister Becky who got me started when I was 6, turning our living room into "American Bandstand." While Dick Clark introduced acts like Jerry Lee Lewis on the black-and-white screen, she welcomed boyfriends who pulled up to our curb in freshly waxed Chevys, and girlfriends in saddle oxfords.

On her tape player in a zippered case, I can still see the 45-r.p.yard. recording of Elvis's "Hound Canis familiaris" spinning effectually. When i finished, some other clattered onto the turntable. Becky taught me the jitterbug to "Be-Bop-a-Lula." When heavenly Johnny Mathis crooned at her slumber parties I learned the wearisome trip the light fantastic, how the adult female would lean her head on the shoulder of a human while maintaining a proper altitude. Equally a outset grader, I was the practice partner for her xvi- and 17-year-sometime girlfriends. Then the big boys showed up to escort them to the Potato High hop.

Whites and blacks were notwithstanding divide in that pre-civil rights South. At loftier school football game games I went to as a pre-teen, every actor, band fellow member, cheerleader and fan was white.

In 1958, When Ray Charles played the Harlem Duke Social Society in the predominantly black office of town, only the nearly adventurous whites might turn upwardly. But that music — and those dancing styles — poured into our living rooms.

Equally the 1960s broke over u.s.a., and teeny boppers were screaming at the Beatles' debut on Ed Sullivan, the old-style dancing seemed still in identify in Mobile — holding hands, leaning close, following a step.

In inferior high came cotillion, a rite of passage for boys whose families considered it role of our social education. One time a week our parents would carpool a clutch of us to a gym where, pomaded and cologned, we lined upward on one side with girls on the other. Paired up, we followed an instructor to master ballroom basics.

Like legions before me, I discovered the pre-mating ritual, even in the most innocent circumstances, of belongings up a girl's right hand with your left, your right hand firm on the small of her back, her left hand over your shoulder. Where practice you wait? What practice you lot say? And all the while smelling her perfume. What, to a 14-year-old, could be more intoxicating?

Ironically, nosotros had more physical contact with the contrary sex that fashion than dancing to the heavy stone, with its counterculture trappings, that was making its way toward us in the Deep South. By 1968, when I was fifteen, Iron Butterfly'due south "Inna Gadda Da Vida," and Cream's "In a White Room" were ascendant and dancing with a girl meant gyrating and rolling your caput. Irksome dancing (the wrap-effectually, we called it) was a sweaty, lumbering hug.

Similar teenagers all over, we were captivated by the ecstatic explorations of Joe Cocker, Ravi Shankar, the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix, but music wasn't so much a force of dancing every bit of being transported into a heed-altered world. When a band played "Light My Fire" at a high school party, we wriggled close to our dates, just didn't really dance.

John Travolta brought dorsum smoothen couple moves with his Tony Manero at a Brooklyn disco in "Sabbatum Night Fever." I was in my 20s past and so, having moved due north to Manhattan to get-go a writing career, and tin recall the Palladium on 14th Street, where most of us but shook and shimmied in fevered foreplay.

Did it matter that the foxtrot, waltz, rumba, tango, jitterbug, shag, cha-cha, cumbia, disco, and endless combinations of partner dancing — outside of dance clubs and Television receiver competitions – soon seemed difficult to find?

Not only was an art form being lost but also a way for couples to play off each other, feel the rhythm of each other, ride the music with each other. And to amuse each other, irresolute partners, too. In my parents' solar day, nobody coupled up every trip the light fantastic with the human being or woman of their dreams, or anybody else. That just wasn't sociable – or fun.

Whatever their colorful names – frug, watusi, swim, funky chicken, jerk, on downwards to the rave, hip-hop, techno – free-class displaced practiced form.

In Mobile, when my girl was a teenager, we sent her to cotillion, but she and her friends chafed at what she calls "organized dancing." The joy of moving every bit you wanted – the tribal heat of youth, not the directives of ballroom – was what was liberating, expressive.

For me, though, it doesn't affair whether it'southward Sinatra or the Stones on my audio system at habitation in the Alabama woods, or a global beat at a Brooklyn bar. My parents' gracefulness still rises inside me, and I accept my married woman's hand, feeling her pull, press and twirl as nosotros starting time a tiresome swing.

easononvalcor.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/31/booming/dancing-across-the-generations.html

Share this post