Dancing Queen

My mother loves to dance. She used to drag my brother around the living room floor trying to teach him "how to be a gentleman," demonstrating with my grandfather, her dad.

When I was 8, we moved into a new house across the country from our old house. My dad was promoted at work, but he would have been promoted had we stayed, too. So the move has never really been explained. When we moved, my grandparents moved in with us. I'm not sure why my dad thought living with his in-laws would be a good idea, but he agreed to it. My parents thought it would be good for them (my grandparents) and good for us (the kids).

Oddly enough, my mom's one of the last people you'd expect to think that this was a good idea. She and my grandmother have never gotten on all that well.

All of which is beside the point. We moved. My dad bought a piano and lessons were declared mandatory for the children. My mother joined us in lessons for the first year and then gave up. My grandmother, however, plays by ear. Any 1930-40s standard is in her repertoire, but because the melody's accompaniment is all hand trickery, they all sound much the same.

On Sundays, after dinner, she would play. Sometimes we would, as a family, join her to listen. My mother would dance. She would tell us how she and her two sisters saved their allowance for weeks to buy a set of those paper dance-teacher feet -- the ones you lay on the floor so that you can learn all the dance steps. She would talk of borrowing crinnolines from friends to "poof" your skirt bigger to go to dances in the 1950s. She would tell us about the church fundraiser talent show at which she performed the Charleston (my father apparently played the baby Chastity Bono for a Sonny-and-Cher performance....).

So I liked dancing. Dancing led to stories. As for the action, for me it is much like any other physical activity: I'm not all that coordinated and don't do it well.

I took ballet at age 6. The recital costumes were pink and blue with silver sequins. There are pictures somewhere. In 7th grade, my mother was guilted into signing me up for cotillion. For those of you not from the South, this is the three years of dancing lessons that prepare girls for their coming out parties. It meant gloves. At 12. And dancing. With boys. Which was humiliating in so many ways. No one explained the debutante thing to my mother -- she just thought dancing would be fun. In college (besides another stint at ballet for a PE credit), I discovered dance clubs, swing dancing, and line dancing. I am not good at any of them. But the benefit of dance clubs is that everyone there is drinking and not noticing that you cannot dance.

I made the mistake of telling my mother about line dancing, which I find fun mainly because it's incredibly ridiculous and (for uncoordinated me) impossible. She thought it sounded like a great idea.

So one night, mid-1990s, my midwestern mother dragged my midwestern father to a country western bar in the southeast. And learned to line dance.

The next weekend I was home from college, my mother showed off what she had learned:

The Marcarena.

(You knew I'd get to the point eventually, right?)