Can I have this dance?

After growing up in sexual segregation, there comes an age when parents want to introduce you to one another in a polite and socially acceptable manner, called dancing.

Get all spiffy and put on your Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes and polish your shoes. Throw some stinky stuff on your face and get ready to dance.

Boys will line one wall and girls will line the other. These are the rules.

The music will start playing and no one will make a move. Some chaperons will get out on the dance floor to help things along, but until they grab one of the boys and drag him across the dance floor to a girl, the sides will stay apart.

Having been properly trained in etiquette procedure, the boy will bow, reach out his hand and ask, “Would you have this dance?” or something similar. It is an open-ended question.

The girls will all giggle and hide their faces.

If the girl was to turn down the invitation because the boy is too tall or too short or a geek, he’d be humiliated and have to slowly sulk back to the boys wall to be ridiculed.

But the chaperons (the muscle) are close at hand waving the girl on to accept.

So the girl will curtsy and put out her white-gloved hand (don’t want to touch no sweaty boy’s hand) and be lead out to the center of the dance floor.

Most are trained in basic dance moves, like the box step, so standing as far apart as their arm will go, the feet start to move and the kids will stare at their feet trying not to step on each other.

More and more couples started filling the floor with much prodding and soon laughter mixed with the music.

And when the music stopped, the shocked kids would run back to their wall to compare notes with the others.

Another song would start and a few adventures would repeat their last journey across the floor choosing a dance partner. After awhile the tension dropped and the kids were just having fun hopping around together.

When the music got louder and feet moved faster and arms started flailing and everyone was having fun. Kids started gyrating to dances they had seen on Dick Clark’s Bandstand trying out the twist, mash potato, hitchhike, Watusi and even some Latin moves like the cha-cha (all those wild goings on that the church disapproved of).  

Then the lights would dim and the music would soften for the slow dance. The room was filled with the smell of testosterone and couples were forming familiar moves. Hopefully the chaperons were hitting the punch thinking their work was done.

Boys and girls intertwined arms as slow shuffles of shoes added to the body’s grinding together. Either out of exhaustion or possibly a romantic sign the girl would put her head on the boy’s shoulder. The music couldn’t go on long enough.

Dancing had now introduced the sexes and all hell was about to break loose. Katy bar the door. 

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