No Girl in Her Right Mind is Going to Slow Dance
With You
By Joe Acton
The worst thing about learning how to dance was that you had to do it with girls.
Not that I didn't like girls — I liked them as much as, say, Easter — you know — you liked searching for the best looking egg, but you weren't exactly sure your mom would let you eat it when you found it?
Stop reaching for the Freud books because it's not what you're thinking. All I'm saying is that getting up the nerve to ask a girl to dance was like an Easter Egg hunt: it happened once a year, involved a lot of other guys looking for the same thing, and generally I got there too late.
My mom was a big help, though. She taught me everything I'd need to know about dancing and how to ask a girl to do it. Dance that is. And I'd have been in good shape too, if girls were still keeping dance cards and doing the Lindy-hop and Charleston in 1964. But they weren't.
Heck, they weren't even doing the Bohemian Polka that I was a whiz at.
So, after a couple of crucial misfires in the I'M GOING TO GO TO THE DANCE AND BE A WALL FLOWER department, my mom decided to send me to a dance class. This turned out to be roughly the equivalent of teaching your kid Modern Math: not only does the kid get worse at it than when he or she started, after taking a few lessons your kid wants to join the Norman Bates Dance Academy to study the Shower Tango — performed a-ca-music on the offending parent with something just this side of a buzz-saw.
The dance instructor allowed that in order to do "today's dances" you (in this case me) had to learn "the fundamentals."
Now for those of you who have never had to learn the fundamentals what it involves is doing a lot of stuff that nobody but the instructor does or understands anymore, but because he has certain financial obligations, like house payments and his kid's college tuition, you're (in this case me again) are obliged to learn. You're also obliged to look like a baby walrus toe-dancing on the head of a pin and scattering pixie dust while you're doing it.
Me and Ty Settles had to go to the Silver Slipper Dance and Tap Academy. I know, I know. It's supposed to be "Ty Settles and I ..." but when you're fourteen-years old and your mother cons your friend's mother into sending him along with you so that the entire school can be sure to keep your ridicule meter red-lined, then the grammar books allow you to go first in the sentence.
Now don't get me wrong. Mom meant well and I knew it. So did Ty's mom. But that didn't make much difference when we showed up for our first lesson and discovered that we had to wear those tweekie little black slippers and black tights.
Aw, mom. Come on. Ty plays basketball, I play hockey. What are the guys going to say? Worse, what are the girls going to say? I can whip most of the guys, but the girls — I thought the point was to learn to dance so girls would want to go out with me. Why don't we just take out an ad in the Anchorage Daily News that says, "Joe and Ty are a couple of ferries and we don't care who knows it?" That way we won't have to worry about dancing OR dating with anybody else except each other. What the heck — Ty's tall — he can lead.
Yammer, yammer, yammer. Gripe, gripe, gripe. Grump, Grump, Grump. The whining was endless — before and after each lesson which seemed to last at least an hour longer than the worst dentist appointment I'd ever had.
So I quit. Well, actually, what really happened is that Mr. John, our very own dance pixie, decided we had learned as much as we could from his school and it was time we moved on. To another school. Or Juvenile Detention Center. Anywhere would do, but preferably far enough away that no one could associate our dance antics with his school.
And so I thought I had it made. After all, Mr. John and my mom had been concentrating on dancing with girls by actually touching them — on the hand, around the waist, on the shoulder — you know — places that you could only see in a National Geographic Magazine without getting put on restriction.
But all that was over and done with now that I'd quit those stupid dance lessons. Besides, I assured my mom there was no need for this junk anymore because nobody touched nothing anymore when you danced. In fact, if you weren't paying close attention, you could lose track of who you were supposed to be dancing with in the first place.
And to prove my point I went to a dance and waited around until Billie Blake asked me to dance (because she wanted to make James Howard jealous by dancing with the biggest geek either of them could imagine — it worked too, because right after I sneezed all over her back she and James got back together again).
So Billie gets me out on the dance floor of this sock hop expecting nothing more than to make James mad and probably inspire him to get up off his knuckles, swing out of his tree two branches at a time and beat the snot out of me. And just as I was warming up to the idea of fast-dancing with a REAL BABE before I died, the disk-jockey announces a Twist contest.
I'd never done the Twist before, or any other fast-dance for that matter, so I just watched Billie get into the groove and did everything she did. How hard can this be, I figured. Basically it was the same motion I used as a kid when I had to go to the bathroom. I figured the Twist was nothing more than an experiment in race-memory.
We won second place, proving my point that I didn't need anymore lessons from Mr. John to dance with girls. All I really needed was a corral of girls who either didn't care who they were seen dancing with or couldn't see who they were dancing with.
There's nothing quite as obnoxious as a young man on a roll. I had danced with a girl and I had won — second place maybe, but it beat everything else below second place. That meant — I WAS BAD.
Right after the Twist, I learned the jitter-bug. Sort of. Never could quite get the hang of when I was supposed to be pulling the girl in or pushing her out. Essentially I had invented Slam Dancing without knowing it. The girls knew it though and stopped saying "Yes" when I'd ask them to dance to a jitter-bug tune.
The Jerk, a dance which epitomized my dancing in both style and concept, was one that took me a while to conquer. Fortunately, by the time I figured it out, it was out of style.
Equally fortunate was that at about the same time, my buddy Craig Goodrich took it upon himself to teach me how to fast dance. But you couldn't just dance. You had to look cool when you danced.
Take it from me. When you're a skinny pencil-necked geek wearing blue-jeans, wing tips, and a wool Pendleton shirt, its hard to look cool when you're dancing. I mean, how can you look cool when you're dancing when you can't even look cool standing still?
Goodrich watched my style in his kitchen and gave his diagnosis:
"Geez, Acton. You look like Bambi caught on the ice. Your arms are flailing all over the place and your legs look like you're running in place. If you don't clobber your date you'll probably kick her to death. Slow your act down, man. Take it easy. You got to think cool. You can't look cool jumping around all over the place. Watch me."
So he cues up Odis Redding's Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay, and starts dancing.
"All you got to do is snap your fingers to the beat, shuffle your feat back and forth to the back-beat, bob your head a little to the rhythm, lip sync a few lines, spin around at the end of each stanza and give your date a little devil-may-care grin every now and then. Nothin' to it."
NOTHIN' TO IT? WHAT IN GAWD'S NAME IS HE TALKING ABOUT? IF I COULD DO ALL THAT I'D BE THE DRUMMER IN A ROCK AND ROLL BAND AND WOULDN'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT ANYTHING EXCEPT WHICH PART OF MY CLOTHES THE GIRLS WERE GOING TO TEAR OFF FIRST. WHY DON'T I JUST TRY JUGGLING LIVE CROCODILES — IT'D BE EASIER AND I'D BE A LOT LESS BUSY?
After a lot of practice I finally got most of it down except the spinning part — always wound up facing away from the girl no matter where I started.
After that we moved on to the Cha-Cha.
"Acton, I'm telling you the Cha-Cha is a must for a guy like you. It's a half-way dance between fast-dancing and slow-dancing. Now we both know that no girl in her right mind is going to slow dance with you unless she's new or stupid or both. Right?"
That about summed it up as well as anything else, I guessed.
"So what you got to do is learn a dance where the girl can sorta get used to you touching her, but not all the time. Then, if she kinda likes the way you do the Cha-Cha, maybe she'll let you slow dance with her."
"You see, you gotta know the basic rule in dancing: guys only get to dance with girls that will let them — girls, on the other hand, get to dance with anybody they want. So you gotta be able to do something good, even if it's dumb or they'll never let you dance with them."
No doubt about it. I was learning from a pro. What insight. What genius.
So I learned the Cha-Cha. Or at least Craig's version of it. Which, unfortunately, was not the same version as what the girls had learned. And I didn't find that out until I was at a Cotillion Club dance. And was dancing with Miss Priss, Ball Queen for 1967. She'd spotted me in the crowd and decided to ask me to dance so she could say she'd danced with a hockey player, I guess.
Anyway, we get out on the dance floor with everybody else but because she was the Queen, we started to dance before the rest of the crowd. And it was a Cha-Cha.
Now Sweat. Goodrich's is in the crowd and gives me the nod of approval to groove out and show my stuff.
So the music starts. And I step forward. And she steps backward. And I'm already standing on one of her feet. And I step forward with the other foot. And she steps backward with the other foot. And now I'm standing on her dress BECAUSE CRAIG GOODRICH TAUGHT ME TO START OUT ON THE WRONG FOOT AND MY LIFE WAS STARTING TO PASS RIGHT BEFORE MY EYES AS THE BOTTOM HALF OF THE FRONT OF THE QUEEN'S DRESS TORE CLEAN AWAY AS SHE FELL STRAIGHT OVER BACKWARDS WHILE I STOOD THERE LIKE A BIG DUMMY WONDERING IF THE FRENCH FOREIGN LEGION WOULD TAKE SOMEONE WHO COULDN'T EVEN DO THE CHA-CHA.
So I never really got the hang of slow dancing. Which up until last week wasn't that big a deal. But then, up until last week, my daughter had never gone to a prom, either. Which naturally meant, that she needed to be taught how to dance. And I figured I could at least pass on to her my talent, insight and wisdom.
And so upon hearing of my intention to teach her to dance, she asked her mom if I had even the foggiest idea of how to dance. So her mother graciously, and in great and laborious, detail related much of the above to her.
And upon hearing of my great dancing prowess Erica looked at me and said, "No thanks dad, maybe I'll just rip my dress off, throw it at my date and call it even."
Sometimes it goes on like this for days and days. And then your wife gets a sudden memory enhancement. And then your kid finds out you were Leadfoot, The Dancing Geek. And then it gets worse.
By Joe Acton
The worst thing about learning how to dance was that you had to do it with girls.
Not that I didn't like girls — I liked them as much as, say, Easter — you know — you liked searching for the best looking egg, but you weren't exactly sure your mom would let you eat it when you found it?
Stop reaching for the Freud books because it's not what you're thinking. All I'm saying is that getting up the nerve to ask a girl to dance was like an Easter Egg hunt: it happened once a year, involved a lot of other guys looking for the same thing, and generally I got there too late.
My mom was a big help, though. She taught me everything I'd need to know about dancing and how to ask a girl to do it. Dance that is. And I'd have been in good shape too, if girls were still keeping dance cards and doing the Lindy-hop and Charleston in 1964. But they weren't.
Heck, they weren't even doing the Bohemian Polka that I was a whiz at.
So, after a couple of crucial misfires in the I'M GOING TO GO TO THE DANCE AND BE A WALL FLOWER department, my mom decided to send me to a dance class. This turned out to be roughly the equivalent of teaching your kid Modern Math: not only does the kid get worse at it than when he or she started, after taking a few lessons your kid wants to join the Norman Bates Dance Academy to study the Shower Tango — performed a-ca-music on the offending parent with something just this side of a buzz-saw.
The dance instructor allowed that in order to do "today's dances" you (in this case me) had to learn "the fundamentals."
Now for those of you who have never had to learn the fundamentals what it involves is doing a lot of stuff that nobody but the instructor does or understands anymore, but because he has certain financial obligations, like house payments and his kid's college tuition, you're (in this case me again) are obliged to learn. You're also obliged to look like a baby walrus toe-dancing on the head of a pin and scattering pixie dust while you're doing it.
Me and Ty Settles had to go to the Silver Slipper Dance and Tap Academy. I know, I know. It's supposed to be "Ty Settles and I ..." but when you're fourteen-years old and your mother cons your friend's mother into sending him along with you so that the entire school can be sure to keep your ridicule meter red-lined, then the grammar books allow you to go first in the sentence.
Now don't get me wrong. Mom meant well and I knew it. So did Ty's mom. But that didn't make much difference when we showed up for our first lesson and discovered that we had to wear those tweekie little black slippers and black tights.
Aw, mom. Come on. Ty plays basketball, I play hockey. What are the guys going to say? Worse, what are the girls going to say? I can whip most of the guys, but the girls — I thought the point was to learn to dance so girls would want to go out with me. Why don't we just take out an ad in the Anchorage Daily News that says, "Joe and Ty are a couple of ferries and we don't care who knows it?" That way we won't have to worry about dancing OR dating with anybody else except each other. What the heck — Ty's tall — he can lead.
Yammer, yammer, yammer. Gripe, gripe, gripe. Grump, Grump, Grump. The whining was endless — before and after each lesson which seemed to last at least an hour longer than the worst dentist appointment I'd ever had.
So I quit. Well, actually, what really happened is that Mr. John, our very own dance pixie, decided we had learned as much as we could from his school and it was time we moved on. To another school. Or Juvenile Detention Center. Anywhere would do, but preferably far enough away that no one could associate our dance antics with his school.
And so I thought I had it made. After all, Mr. John and my mom had been concentrating on dancing with girls by actually touching them — on the hand, around the waist, on the shoulder — you know — places that you could only see in a National Geographic Magazine without getting put on restriction.
But all that was over and done with now that I'd quit those stupid dance lessons. Besides, I assured my mom there was no need for this junk anymore because nobody touched nothing anymore when you danced. In fact, if you weren't paying close attention, you could lose track of who you were supposed to be dancing with in the first place.
And to prove my point I went to a dance and waited around until Billie Blake asked me to dance (because she wanted to make James Howard jealous by dancing with the biggest geek either of them could imagine — it worked too, because right after I sneezed all over her back she and James got back together again).
So Billie gets me out on the dance floor of this sock hop expecting nothing more than to make James mad and probably inspire him to get up off his knuckles, swing out of his tree two branches at a time and beat the snot out of me. And just as I was warming up to the idea of fast-dancing with a REAL BABE before I died, the disk-jockey announces a Twist contest.
I'd never done the Twist before, or any other fast-dance for that matter, so I just watched Billie get into the groove and did everything she did. How hard can this be, I figured. Basically it was the same motion I used as a kid when I had to go to the bathroom. I figured the Twist was nothing more than an experiment in race-memory.
We won second place, proving my point that I didn't need anymore lessons from Mr. John to dance with girls. All I really needed was a corral of girls who either didn't care who they were seen dancing with or couldn't see who they were dancing with.
There's nothing quite as obnoxious as a young man on a roll. I had danced with a girl and I had won — second place maybe, but it beat everything else below second place. That meant — I WAS BAD.
Right after the Twist, I learned the jitter-bug. Sort of. Never could quite get the hang of when I was supposed to be pulling the girl in or pushing her out. Essentially I had invented Slam Dancing without knowing it. The girls knew it though and stopped saying "Yes" when I'd ask them to dance to a jitter-bug tune.
The Jerk, a dance which epitomized my dancing in both style and concept, was one that took me a while to conquer. Fortunately, by the time I figured it out, it was out of style.
Equally fortunate was that at about the same time, my buddy Craig Goodrich took it upon himself to teach me how to fast dance. But you couldn't just dance. You had to look cool when you danced.
Take it from me. When you're a skinny pencil-necked geek wearing blue-jeans, wing tips, and a wool Pendleton shirt, its hard to look cool when you're dancing. I mean, how can you look cool when you're dancing when you can't even look cool standing still?
Goodrich watched my style in his kitchen and gave his diagnosis:
"Geez, Acton. You look like Bambi caught on the ice. Your arms are flailing all over the place and your legs look like you're running in place. If you don't clobber your date you'll probably kick her to death. Slow your act down, man. Take it easy. You got to think cool. You can't look cool jumping around all over the place. Watch me."
So he cues up Odis Redding's Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay, and starts dancing.
"All you got to do is snap your fingers to the beat, shuffle your feat back and forth to the back-beat, bob your head a little to the rhythm, lip sync a few lines, spin around at the end of each stanza and give your date a little devil-may-care grin every now and then. Nothin' to it."
NOTHIN' TO IT? WHAT IN GAWD'S NAME IS HE TALKING ABOUT? IF I COULD DO ALL THAT I'D BE THE DRUMMER IN A ROCK AND ROLL BAND AND WOULDN'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT ANYTHING EXCEPT WHICH PART OF MY CLOTHES THE GIRLS WERE GOING TO TEAR OFF FIRST. WHY DON'T I JUST TRY JUGGLING LIVE CROCODILES — IT'D BE EASIER AND I'D BE A LOT LESS BUSY?
After a lot of practice I finally got most of it down except the spinning part — always wound up facing away from the girl no matter where I started.
After that we moved on to the Cha-Cha.
"Acton, I'm telling you the Cha-Cha is a must for a guy like you. It's a half-way dance between fast-dancing and slow-dancing. Now we both know that no girl in her right mind is going to slow dance with you unless she's new or stupid or both. Right?"
That about summed it up as well as anything else, I guessed.
"So what you got to do is learn a dance where the girl can sorta get used to you touching her, but not all the time. Then, if she kinda likes the way you do the Cha-Cha, maybe she'll let you slow dance with her."
"You see, you gotta know the basic rule in dancing: guys only get to dance with girls that will let them — girls, on the other hand, get to dance with anybody they want. So you gotta be able to do something good, even if it's dumb or they'll never let you dance with them."
No doubt about it. I was learning from a pro. What insight. What genius.
So I learned the Cha-Cha. Or at least Craig's version of it. Which, unfortunately, was not the same version as what the girls had learned. And I didn't find that out until I was at a Cotillion Club dance. And was dancing with Miss Priss, Ball Queen for 1967. She'd spotted me in the crowd and decided to ask me to dance so she could say she'd danced with a hockey player, I guess.
Anyway, we get out on the dance floor with everybody else but because she was the Queen, we started to dance before the rest of the crowd. And it was a Cha-Cha.
Now Sweat. Goodrich's is in the crowd and gives me the nod of approval to groove out and show my stuff.
So the music starts. And I step forward. And she steps backward. And I'm already standing on one of her feet. And I step forward with the other foot. And she steps backward with the other foot. And now I'm standing on her dress BECAUSE CRAIG GOODRICH TAUGHT ME TO START OUT ON THE WRONG FOOT AND MY LIFE WAS STARTING TO PASS RIGHT BEFORE MY EYES AS THE BOTTOM HALF OF THE FRONT OF THE QUEEN'S DRESS TORE CLEAN AWAY AS SHE FELL STRAIGHT OVER BACKWARDS WHILE I STOOD THERE LIKE A BIG DUMMY WONDERING IF THE FRENCH FOREIGN LEGION WOULD TAKE SOMEONE WHO COULDN'T EVEN DO THE CHA-CHA.
So I never really got the hang of slow dancing. Which up until last week wasn't that big a deal. But then, up until last week, my daughter had never gone to a prom, either. Which naturally meant, that she needed to be taught how to dance. And I figured I could at least pass on to her my talent, insight and wisdom.
And so upon hearing of my intention to teach her to dance, she asked her mom if I had even the foggiest idea of how to dance. So her mother graciously, and in great and laborious, detail related much of the above to her.
And upon hearing of my great dancing prowess Erica looked at me and said, "No thanks dad, maybe I'll just rip my dress off, throw it at my date and call it even."
Sometimes it goes on like this for days and days. And then your wife gets a sudden memory enhancement. And then your kid finds out you were Leadfoot, The Dancing Geek. And then it gets worse.