The growling sax and hoochie-coochie drummer were backing a group called The Diamonds. The song was “The Stroll.” The kids weren’t doing that dance, though. Not quite.
The Stroll was the first step Christy and I learned when we started going to Thursday-night dance classes. It’s a two-by-two dance, a kind of icebreaker where each couple jives down an aisle of clapping guys and girls. What I saw when I came back into the gym was different. Here the boys and the girls came together, turned in each other’s arms as if waltzing, then separated again, ending up across from where they had begun. When they were apart, their feet went back on their heels and their hips swayed forward, a move that was both charming and sexy.
As I watched from beside the snack table, Mike, Jim, and Vince joined the guys’ side. Vince didn’t have much — to say he danced like a white boy would be an insult to white boys everywhere — but Jim and Mike moved like the athletes they were, which is to say with unconscious grace. Pretty soon most of the girls on the other side were watching them.
“I was starting to worry about you!” Sadie shouted over the music. “Is everything all right out there?”
“Fine!” I shouted back. “What’s that dance?”
“The Madison! They’ve been doing it on Bandstand all month! Want me to teach you?”
“Lady,” I said, taking her by the arm, “I’m going to teach you.”
The kids saw us coming and made room, clapping and shouting
The song ended, the growling sax fading off into that rock n roll eternity our young DJ was pleased to call the grooveyard, and we started to walk off the floor.
“God, that was fun,” she said. She took my arm and squeezed it. “
Before I could answer, Donald blared out through the PA. “In honor of two chaperones who can actually dance — a first in the history of our school — here’s a blast from the past, gone from the charts but not from our hearts, a platter that matters, straight from my own daddy-o’s record collection, which he doesn’t know I brought and if any of you cool cats tell him, I’m in trouble. Dig it, all you steady rockers, this is how they did it when Mr. A. and Miz D. were in high school!”
They all turned to look at us, and… well…
You know how, when you’re out at night and you see the edge of a cloud light up a bright gold, you know the moon is going to come out in a second or two? That was the feeling I had right then, standing among the gently swaying crepe streamers in the Denholm gymnasium. I knew what he was going to play, I knew we were going to dance to it, and I knew
Glenn Miller. “In the Mood.”
Sadie reached behind her and pulled the elastic, releasing the ponytail. She was still laughing and beginning to hip-sway just a little bit. Her hair slipped smoothly from one shoulder to the other.
“Can you swing?” Raising my voice to be heard over the music. Knowing she could. Knowing she
“Do you mean like the Lindy Hop?” she asked.
“That’s what I mean.”
“Well…”
“Go, Miz Dunhill,” one of the girls said. “We want to see it.” And two of her friends pushed Sadie toward me.
She hesitated. I did another spin and held out my hands. The kids cheered as we moved out on the floor. They gave us room. I pulled her toward me, and after the smallest of hesitations, she spun first to the left and then to the right, the A-line of the jumper she was wearing giving her just enough room to cross her feet as she went. It was the Lindy variation Richie-from-the-ditchie and Bevvie-from-the-levee had been learning that day in the fall of 1958. It was the Hellzapoppin. Of course it was. Because the past harmonizes.
I brought her to me by our clasped hands, then let her go back. We separated. Then, like people who had practiced these moves for months (possibly to a slowed-down record in a deserted picnic area), we bent and kicked, first to the left and then to the right. The kids laughed and cheered. They had formed a clapping circle around us in the middle of the polished floor.
We came together and she twirled like a hopped-up ballerina beneath our linked hands.
