Dancing Dads

When
my wife and I first came to Austin I first came to Austin, we used to go out to country bars and admire the older
couples gliding effortlessly around the dance floor. They looked so comfortable
in each others’ arms, so content. Who cared if they had big hair, large
bellies, and wrinkles? Who cared if they wore matching homemade,
glitter-encrusted red-fringed cowboy shirts, and belts with the names Bud and
Billy carved in the back? They still looked sophisticated and sexy out on the
floor.

When my wife and I go out dancing these days, we are one of those older
couples. We’ve got big guts and ill-fitting clothes. But we still manage to
wheeze through the jitterbugs and spin a waltz or two before we collapse back
at our table and start complaining about the kids.

My wife likes to say that dancing has kept our marriage together, and she may
be right. Dancing is the second most intimate thing a couple can do. It
requires patience and trust, a willingness to give yourself to your partner,
and a willingness to lead your partner into unexplored territory. It requires
imagination, variation and a sense of humor. Sometimes, dancing is the best
kind of foreplay. Even non-dancers know that this is true. “I let someone else
pump up the tires,” said a non-dancing acquaintance of mine. “Then I take the
ride.”

When a relationship hits the rocks, dancing is a great way to keep in physical
contact when the other more intimate activity is out of the question. And it’s
a whole lot less painful than punching, biting, kicking, scratching, or
throwing rolling pins.

Even the Baptists have come to appreciate dancing. When they recently allowed
dancing on campus, the folks up at Baylor finally acknowledged that shaking it
on the dance floor is a whole lot better than making it in the bushes.

The big problem with dancing, and the reason everyone doesn’t do it all the
time, is that men are severely dance-challenged. Your average woman can dance
rings around your average man. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s a certain dancing
gene that allows women to keep the beat. Maybe it’s a design issue — women’s
curves may be just right for the proper air flow. Maybe it’s just one of those
subtle differences, like facial hair and genitals, that separate the sexes. But
if you gaze out at any dance floor, the women will look good, and the men will
look like goobers.

There are ways that men can compensate for their dancing inadequacies. The
first way is to learn how to count. One-two. One-two. One-two. Say that aloud
while you’re stomping on the floor and you’ll be able to keep the beat for the
two-step. One-two-three. One-two-three. One-two-three. That’s the waltz. Count
it faster and you have a polka. One-two-three-four. One-two-three-four, and you
have your basic jitterbug. One-fourteen-five-twelve. One-three-nine-eighteen —
you’re into some kind of freeform jazz thing. Or you never left that last
Grateful Dead concert.

If you’re line dancing, you’re lucky. Just keep an eye on the person next to
you. Since everyone looks like a goober anyway, you don’t have to worry about
it. The Cotton-Eyed Joe is even better. All you have to do is hang on to
someone’s shoulders and yell, “Bullshit.” The Bunny Hop is even easier. You
don’t have to yell anything; all you have to do is hang on to someone’s butt.

Some men can’t bunny hop but still want to dance. So they jump around on the
floor with a modified twist, swim, watusi, or mashed potato. Lots of guys make
up their own dance. My favorite dance is something I call the White Man. Stand
at the edge of a crowd, hold a beer in your hand, and bob up and down. Groovy,
huh? Especially if you’re wearing a black T-shirt.

Guys without grey hairs or beer guts lunge into mosh pits. Slam-dancing of all
varieties makes for great male bonding, but it won’t do much for your
relationships with women. Unless your wife or girlfriend enjoys performing
plastic surgery.

Dancing lessons can help. It’s tough enough to stand there with a bunch of
other left-footed geeks and trip over your partner in front of a full-length
body mirror, but if two people can make it through dance lessons without
permanent injury, they can probably make it through anything. As one wife said
to her husband at the end of a bruising hour of tango tackle, “You must really
love me for this.”

Even with dancing lessons, a man is gonna blow it all the time. Just remember
that it’s your job to lead, and that any mistake that happens on the dance
floor is all your fault. Like when you slam your elbow into the neck of the
petite blonde waltzing next to you. Or when you lock into a professional
wrestling stranglehold at the end of a jitterbug turn. A smile and an “excuse
me” will go a long way towards healing the pain.

Of course, apologies will only get you so far. One time, I was spinning to a
fast polka when I let go of my partner. Wham! She fell right down on her butt
in the middle of the dance floor. I picked her up graciously, apologized,
started dancing and promptly proceeded to drop her on her butt once again. That
was the end of our beautiful but bruising relationship.

My wife and I stopped
dancing when we had kids. We were trapped for years between work, the diaper
pail, and reruns of Wheel of Fortune.

Recently, we had a party. There were a bunch of people there, standing around,
yakking at each other. My daughter went into our living room and turned on the
Macarena. Instantly, the dance floor was filled with the elementary crowd,
flapping their arms, wagging their heads, and dancing. The flat-footed parents
were shocked. “I didn’t know my kid could do that!” many of them said. Some of
them were a little disturbed. If these kids can shake their butts so well, they
thought, what the hell else can they do? Once all the parents joined in,
everything was fine. How can you worry about behavior modification when you’re
jumping around like a five-year-old cheerleader?

My daughter had so much fun dancing at our party, that she asked to have her
ninth birthday at the Broken Spoke. I was thrilled. A honky-tonk with friendly
waitresses beats the video games and lurching robots at Chuck E. Cheese any
day.

As we entered the club, I introduced the birthday girl to Alvin Crow. “Hello,
Amelia,” he said, nodding his large tan cowboy hat in her direction. “Happy
Birthday.” A dozen songs later, Alvin launched into “The Orange Blossom
Special.” One of my daughter’s friends stood at the edge of the dance floor,
too shy to get into the action. The other one took off by herself, turning,
flapping, and running around the edges of the moving crowd.

I took my daughter in my arms and spun her in a non-stop, high-speed polka,
traveling along with fiddle-created train whistles, screeching breaks, and
wheels clacking at supersonic speeds. My daughter was a little bit nervous,
since her feet weren’t touching the floor. But I wasn’t nervous at all. I had
reached that stage of dancing transcendence where my daughter’s face stood out
sharply focused against a background of blurring, multicolored beer signs.

She looked up at me with a shy, handsome smile like her mother’s. She knew
that my arms were there for her, that I wasn’t going to take advantage of her,
that she could stand up proudly as smiling patrons watched her, smiling as they
drank their beer. That’s all a father could ever want for his daughter. To know
that she has the confidence to be her own person, the wisdom to watch out for
herself, and the strength to make the right move, even if it is a quick,
spinning polka.

It wasn’t the symphony, but it was just as educational. The culture police
should require all dads to dance with their daughters at the Broken Spoke.

Dancing is, after all, one of the great Texas traditions. Bob Wills got his start playing house parties for
dancing fools in North Texas. T-Bone Walker was a dancer in Dallas before he
started doing splits and playing the guitar behind his head. Ginger Rogers,
Hollywood’s greatest hoofer, and Tommy Tune, Broadway’s best, came from San
Antonio. Even Pecos Bill loved to dance. One New Year’s Eve, he leveled off
most of West Texas for his own private dance floor and spent the entire evening
twirling around a real cute cumulonimbus. That’s the way I heard it, anyway.

The upshot of all this is that if you want to have a real good time on New
Year’s Eve, get out and dance. It doesn’t matter if you go to a honky-tonk, a
nightclub, a beer garden, a brew pub, or a cocktail lounge. It doesn’t even
matter if you just stay home. Dancing is the best way to stomp down the demons
of the past and welcome in the absurdities of a brand new year.

This article appears in January 3 • 1997 and January 3 • 1997 (Cover).